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Fall 2016 Mellon Seminar 2 Field Trips 10 Campanella Named NYC Parks Historian 18 Handel Architects’ Passive House 22

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

Dean’s Message All the scientific and technological skills of which we can conceive will not solve our world problems if we do not build and adapt a base of human and cultural understanding; ethical and moral underpinnings; sensible rules of law for the 21st century; and integration with the insights, inspirations, and communications of the arts.

— Charles M. Vest, president, National Academy of Engineering, quoted in The Heart of the Matter, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2014

 Rebecca Bowes, Elise Gold Dan Aloi, Rebecca Bowes, Edith Fikes, Sherrie Negrea, Patti Witten, Jay Wrolstad DESIGN KUDOS Design Collaboratory COPY EDITOR Laura Glenn PHOTOGRAPHY William Staffeld (unless otherwise noted) DISTRIBUTION COORDINATOR Sheri D’Elia EDITORS

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

A flood-prone slum in Altamira, a planned city in the Brazilian rain forest, was one of the sites visited by students in the spring seminar Forest Cartographies. photo / Timothy Ryan (B.Arch. ’17)

COVER

© September 2016 Cornell University Printed on Rolland Enviro 100 Satin, a Forestry Stewardship Council stock.

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

It is not news but worth restating: Our age is experiencing the dramatic rise of the city as home to a significant majority of the world’s population. Fifty-four percent of the world’s population now lives in urban settings, and cities like Tokyo, Mumbai, and Shanghai already have populations exceeding 30 million. Assistant Professor Timur Dogan, architecture, noted that if urban population growth projections are accurate, within 35 years the world must build the equivalent of 750 Romes to house future city dwellers. And the trend is geographically skewed: The U.N.’s World Urbanization Prospects reports that nearly 90 percent of the increase in urban population by 2050 will occur in just two continents—Asia and Africa. It is not hyperbolic to call the urban transition that we are living an “urban turn,” comparable to the Copernican revolution that compelled humans five centuries ago to think in radically new ways about their place in the world.

Three years ago, Cornell was challenged by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to think in new ways about teaching this global urban turn. Under the auspices of a nationwide initiative titled Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities (AUH), AAP partnered with Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, and the Cornell University Libraries to offer a series of inventive cross-disciplinary seminars for design and humanities students, jointly taught by faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences and AAP, and focused on a specific archival collection of urban representations or on a particular site of urban drama. Undergirding this initiative was the proposition that contemporary urbanism is not fundamentally a technical problem demanding a technical solution, but a deontic problem, demanding an understanding of how cultures ought to coexist, and how populations of differing means and destinies can find common ground in increasingly dense and diverse urban conditions. In this spirit, this semester

and during the past five semesters humanities and design students have unpacked the library’s unique hip-hop collection; studied urban graffiti with artists and writers; experienced firsthand the negotiated water-land boundaries of Bangkok, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, and the Mekong Delta; and most recently, explored Brazil’s Amazonia to discover the extent and consequences of urbanization in the heart of the rain forest (see page 2).

The city as both subject and site of study has a long and notable history at AAP. A significant moment in this legacy occurred 30 years ago, when a small troupe from Sibley Hall settled into the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne for the inaugural semester of the now renowned Cornell in Rome program.

Three decades of continuous academic programming in the epicenter of Western humanist thought and urban design has yielded one of the country’s premier study abroad programs for artists, architects, planners, and liberal studies students.

Students are immersed in all aspects of the city and learn to read the urban condition through classes and visits that take them to museums, archaeological sites, historical and contemporary art collections, churches, and public spaces.

This coming spring, we will celebrate Cornell in Rome’s 30th anniversary and reaffirm our commitment to the study of the city though a series of tours, lectures, and discussions.

I invite you to come to Rome, reconnect with your classmates, and see the city through the lens of our Rome and Ithaca faculty, students, and distinguished guests for what promises to be three unforgettable days in the eternal city.

Ciao,

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

Final reviews for students in the option studio Frontier Urbanities/Amazonia, taught by Visiting Assistant Professor Tao DuFour and Visiting Critic Paulo Tavares. Guest critics included Alberto Foyo (standing, at left), and Michael Sorkin (seated, second from right).

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Mellon Trip New Faculty; Teiger Gift; Rome Move-In Sabin at Cooper Hewitt Japanese Constellation; AAP Connect Annual Career Forum Fall 2016 Lectures and Exhibitions

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Alumni Profile: Ron Kelly (M.R.P. ’08) Nicolas Martin (B.Arch. ’12) Handel Architects’ Passive House at Cornell Tech Viñoly-Menendez AIA Firm Award; Jury at Broad Museum; Hou de Sousa Wins Folly; Kennedy Fulbright; Schwartz at SXSW Dragon Day 2016

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Student Profile: Jordan Berta (M.Arch. ’16) URS Field Trip; M.F.A. Travels to Mexico; Student Notes Huckfeldt at Historic Ithaca; Baker Field Trip; Rong Wins KPF Fellowship Katya Savelieva (B.F.A./B.A. ’16) Thesis Exhibition Honduras School; Medium Design Collective; Student Awards M.R.P. Urban Social Forum; HPP Work Weekend; M.F.A. Exhibition

Faculty Profile: Barry Perlus, Art Campanella NYC Parks; Atkinson Grants; Minner as Guest Editor; Faculty Notes Carnicero at Venice Biennale; Morris and Woods Graham Foundation Grants; Staffeld Exhibition

Fall 2016

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Mellon Seminar 2 Field Trips 10 Campanella Named NYC Parks Historian 18

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Handel Architects’ Passive House 22

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Mellon Seminar Investigates Cities of the Amazon A 10-day journey to cities in the Brazilian rain forest gave students a firsthand look at the complex conditions of urbanization in the Amazon. The field trip in March, part of the spring seminar Forest Cartographies, focused on issues of community, housing, resettlement, deforestation, political ecology, anthropology, and archaeology.

Forest Cartographies is the fifth in a series of Mellon Seminars in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, fostering intellectual exchange between arts, humanities, social sciences, and design disciplines.

Instructors Tao DuFour, architecture, and Bruno Bosteels, Romance studies, encouraged students to approach the class from their diverse disciplinary perspectives and interests.

“We wanted to keep the seminar very open and dialogical, and encourage cross-pollination of disciplines as students develop individual projects of their own design,” DuFour said.

Bosteels said he and DuFour “strove to open up a variety of debates organized around thematic clusters,” including resource extraction economies “that have supported new left-wing governments in the region,” and human ecology.

Organized into three segments, the trip provided insight into rain-forest urbanization that students had only considered theoretically.

“The scholarly readings and discussions we focused on in class were more deeply explored during our 10 days in the Amazon,” says Rachel Odhner, a doctoral candidate in the field of anthropology. “We had the opportunity to experience the concreteness of these debates and connect the texts and classroom experience to people’s realities.”

The first few days were spent in Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas, where students attended lectures at Museu da Amazônia and were led by local architects on site visits around the city.

Alia Fierro (M.R.P. ’16), saw firsthand and for the first time the subject of four years of research on social, economic, and spatial impacts of Brazil’s federal housing program, Minha Casa Minha Vida. “To witness the scale of such mass, urban disconnect and desolation at the city’s peripheries, and see the physical ramifications of such a massive, one-size-fits-all urban housing policy was very impactful,” she said.

From Manaus, the group traveled to Santarém, a city at the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazon rivers. Archaeological excavations there have uncovered a soil type researchers believe reflects the historical basis of the Amazon’s biodiversity.

“It’s an anthropogenic forest, or what ethnobotanist William Balée [who also traveled with the group] calls a ‘cultural forest,’” DuFour said. “The work of Balée and his colleagues increasingly demonstrates that indigenous communities were able to cultivate the environment in a way that led to an increase in biodiversity.”

Archaeological sites in Santarém were a marked contrast to the planned city on the final leg of the trip—Altamira, which is growing exponentially with the construction of a major hydroelectric dam.

Odhner, whose research examines the politics of water scarcity and climate change, said: “Tracing the effects of the Belo Monte Dam project was the most thought-provoking—and also the most heartbreaking—aspect of the trip. Witnessing the ways in which this dam is impacting local social-ecological systems and transforming the surrounding landscape helps me to think theoretically about similar themes in my own work, and connect these local and regional changes to [global] questions.”

The group visited the construction site and a gridlike housing project for relocated residents, saw the flood-prone urban slums where displaced people were living, and met with residents, lawyers, and other advocates opposing the project.

“The trip . . . also gave us the opportunity to interact with members of local communities who graciously and candidly described the everyday successes and struggles of their lives and work,” said Hannah Bahnmiller (M.R.P. ’17).

Martina Broner, a Ph.D. candidate in Romance studies, agrees. “What I most valued about our trip— in addition to the incredible access we had to sites and experts—was seeing how our interdisciplinary group encountered the landscape of the Amazon,” she says.

“As we each mediated the experience through our own background—architecture, urban planning, art, literature, anthropology—we also engaged in an ongoing conversation that brought these perspectives together.

This conversation has extended beyond the trip and has had meaningful repercussions in my own work.”

The field trip also included students from the architecture studio Frontier Urbanities/Amazonia, taught by DuFour and Visiting Critic Paulo Tavares, whose work is focused on Amazonian urbanization.AAP Rebecca Bowes

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Bruno Bosteels at Cidade das Luzes (City of Lights), the site of an evicted informal neighborhood in Manaus. photo / Hannah Bahnmiller (M.R.P. ’17)

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Tim Ryan (B.Arch. ’17) sketches the tree canopy of the conservation area from the research observation tower of Museu da Amazônia. photo / Hannah Bahnmiller (M.R.P. ’17)

Teiger Estate Gives Additional Gift to Continue Mentorship Program In March, the estate of David Teiger ’51 announced an incremental gift to enable the art mentorship program created in his name to continue. Originally established in 2013, funds from the initial gift sustained the program through the spring 2016 semester; the additional money, which brings the gift total to $1 million, allows the program to carry on for several more years.

During their appointments, Teiger Mentors make ongoing visits to studio and seminar classes and conduct individual critiques with B.F.A. and M.F.A. students.

The program aspires to give undergraduate and graduate art students opportunities to make connections with and learn from a diverse range of leading professional artists.

Mentor artists are selected by a jury composed of members of the art department and external curators and art educators. Sam Durant was the spring semester Teiger Mentor, and previous mentors include Josiah McElheny, Shannon Ebner, Alejandro Cesarco, Leslie Hewitt, and Sharon Hayes.

“From its inception, the Teiger Mentor in the Arts Program has added both richness and intellectual diversity to the culture of creative production, critique, and discussion of student work in the Department of Art,” says Associate Professor and Chair Michael Ashkin.

“On behalf of myself and the community of students, faculty, and artists that will continue to benefit from

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Dimcheff Hired as Richard Meier Assistant Professor of Architecture The Department of Architecture hired Luben Dimcheff (B.Arch. ’99) as the Richard Meier Assistant Professor of Architecture, effective July 1. Dimcheff has been a visiting critic at AAP since 2012, and has taught the Introduction to Architecture Summer Program since the same year.

Dimcheff leads a design and architecture practice based in New York City, with projects built internationally. Prior to establishing his own practice, he was a senior associate at Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects (SMH), where projects included the SMH house at the Houses at Sagaponac development, and the Hospital for Special Surgery building on Manhattan’s waterfront, which received awards from Mayor Bloomberg and the New York City Design Commission.

Dimcheff has taught at Parsons The New School of Design in both the graduate and undergraduate programs. Prior to receiving his B.Arch. from AAP, he had graduated with honors from the Art Institute of Seattle, where he studied fashion and interior design.

Named in honor of Richard Meier (B.Arch. ’56), whose commitment to design excellence is a hallmark of Cornell’s highly ranked architecture program, the Meier Professorship is a tenure-track appointment in architectural design.AAP

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Luben Dimcheff (B.Arch. ’99) is the new Richard Meier Assistant Professor.

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Sam Durant, the spring 2016 Teiger Mentor in the Arts, meets with students during a visit to campus.

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An exhibition of student work in Palazzo Santacroce’s lecture hall was open to the public. photo / Chris Andras (B.Arch. ’18)

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Housed under a 17thcentury fresco, Cornell in Rome’s library is accessed by a spiral staircase. photo / Chris Andras (B.Arch. ’18)

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Students working in one of Cornell in Rome’s two architecture studios. photo / Liana Miuccio

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Sasa Zivkovic.

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the extreme generosity of David Teiger and the Teiger family, I extend my deepest gratitude for their recent gift to the art program and our community.”

Teiger, who passed away in December 2014, was a contemporary art collector and patron of curatorial projects and exhibitions throughout the U.S. and Europe.AAP

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Zivkovic Joins Architecture Faculty The Department of Architecture hired Sasa Zivkovic as an assistant professor on a tenure track, starting July 1. Zivkovic has been a visiting critic in the department since 2014, and is the coprincipal of HANNAH, an architectural practice based in the U.S. and Germany, which focuses on advancing 3D printing and other automated manufacturing techniques in collaboration with the high-tech building industry.

Zivkovic’s academic research focuses on digital fabrication, archaic form, and postdigital practice in the Anthropocene period.

Zivkovic pursued his graduate studies at MIT, where he was the recipient of the AIA Certificate of Merit and a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service. Prior to MIT, Zivkovic studied architecture and city planning at the University of Stuttgart, where he was awarded a fellowship from the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) from 2007 to 2012. He has contributed to the Cornell Journal of Architecture, and exhibited at the 2015 ACADIA conference. His firm, HANNAH, was an Outpost Research Office for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale.AAP

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Cornell in Rome Moves to Palazzo Santacroce In January, Cornell in Rome relocated its headquarters to the Palazzo Santacroce, a 17th-century building in the historic center of Rome, minutes from the Pantheon and Piazza Navona. The palazzo’s spacious studios, classrooms, library, and administrative and faculty offices occupy the entire front of the piano nobile. Large windows and balconies overlook a 19th-century urban park and internal courtyards. A 19th-century spiral staircase leads from a private ground-floor entrance to the program’s library, housed beneath a frescoed vault (circa 1640). The Palazzo Santacroce is the third home for Cornell in Rome, following Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne (1986–96) and Palazzo Cavallerini Lazzaroni (1996–2016).AAP

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News20 | Fall 2016

News&Events

Fiber Pavilion Designed

by Sabin Featured in Design Triennial From February to August, visitors to an exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, walked beneath a shimmering seven-foot-high knitted textile pavilion designed by Jenny Sabin, the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Assistant Professor of Architecture.

The multicolored structure, made from photoluminescent and solar-active threads, was commissioned by the museum for Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, an exhibition featuring more than 250 projects by 62 designers from around the globe.

Andrea Lipps, cocurator of the show, said the museum commissioned the textile pavilion because of Sabin’s pioneering work using emerging technologies in architecture. In addition to her pavilion, PolyThread, the exhibition contained a glass display of five objects designed by Sabin, including several “polybricks” constructed from 3D printing and digital ceramics.

“We have been really attracted to her work because she’s proposing new ways of thinking about architecture,” Lipps said. “She’s doing some very interesting work that fuses digital trajectories with biological and material sciences.”

Beauty was the fifth installment in the Cooper Hewitt’s contemporary design exhibition series that ran through August 21, at the museum at 2 East 91st Street. With projects ranging from fashion ensembles to furniture, the exhibition explored contemporary design from the perspective of aesthetic innovation.

Sabin’s 400-square-foot textile pavilion was the

largest work in the exhibition; covered with a maze of variegated cellular shapes, it featured a 15-minute illumination sequence mimicking the colors of day to night, and changing from a pale blue to white.

As part of her research on the intersection of textiles and architecture, Sabin views PolyThread as a prototype for applications of fabric-based structures in the built environment. “I can see this as a permanent large outdoor pavilion or structure that could operate well in a park or an outdoor environment,” she said.

The process of creating PolyThread took 10 months to complete. Sabin worked on the design with two collaborators at the Sabin Design Lab on campus— Charles Cupples (M.Arch. ’15) and Martin Miller, a former visiting critic at AAP. She installed the pavilion at the Cooper Hewitt during the first week of February with Cupples and two undergraduate architecture students, Max Vanatta (B.Arch. ’16) and Andrew Moorman (B.Arch. ’17). Arup, an international engineering firm with offices in Boston, tested the integrity of the structure, and Shima Seiki U.S.A. Inc., which makes computerized knitting machines, created the material at its headquarters in Monroe Township, New Jersey.AAP

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Visitors snap a photo of themselves under PolyThread on the opening night of the exhibition. photo / © 2016 Scott Rudd

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3D print of PolyThread pavilion

by Jenny Sabin Studio. photo / Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

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PolyThread was the largest installation at Beauty, and featured a 15-minute illumination sequence that mimicked the colors of day to night.

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Japanese Architecture Constellation Comes to AAP

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In early March, the Department of Architecture hosted two internationally acclaimed contemporary Japanese architects, Junya Ishigami and Sou Fujimoto, as part of the 2016 Spring Architecture Lecture Series. Both lectures took place in front of standing-room-only crowds in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium in Milstein Hall.

The lectures given by Ishigami and Fujimoto, who follow in the lineage of the Pritzker Prize winners Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates (SANAA), and Toyo Ito, coincided with their participation in a MoMA exhibition titled A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond, which explored the extensive work of three generations of notable designers from Japan.

Ishigami’s office, junya.ishigami+associates, has won several awards, including the Golden Lion for the best project of the 12th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2010. His lecture was a retrospective of his firm’s prominent works from its founding in 2004 to today.

Fujimoto, who established Sou Fujimoto Architects in 2000, also focused his lecture on his process as demonstrated through several of his more important works, including the 2013 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, and the 2011 House NA. “We were fortunate to be able to have these two renowned architects from Japan lecture back-to-back to full houses here in at AAP,” says Mark Cruvellier, architecture department chair and the Nathaniel and Margaret Owings Professor of Architecture. “Both Ishigami and Fujimoto experiment with the boundary between the natural and built environment, explore building materials and framing systems, and investigate through their built work how seemingly simple concepts and their variations can yield remarkable spatial and formal complexity.”AAP

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AAP Connect Hosts Annual Architecture Career Forum 1

Sou Fujimoto.

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Junya Ishigami.

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A full house watches Fujimoto’s lecture in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium.

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Panel participants respond to student questions at the 2016 Architecture Career Forum. From left: Andrew Gorzkowski (B.Arch. ’13), Francesca Franchi (B.Arch. ’86), Glen Coben (B.Arch. ’86), and Joseph DeSense (B.Arch. ’10).

Not pictured: Will Smith (M.Arch. ’13), and Kirk Finkel (B.Arch. ’11).

The College of Architecture, Art, and Planning’s career services office, AAP Connect, held its third annual Architecture Career Forum in April. The three-day event was the largest to date and provided an opportunity for Cornell architecture alumni to return to the college to interview current students for full-time jobs and internships, and share their professional perspective in a forum for open discussion.

“Interviews have resulted in a steady stream of offers coming in daily. And the networking and knowledge sharing that occur as part of the panel and luncheon are invaluable to architecture students of all years,” says AAP Connect Director Jennifer Micale.

“I am excited to see that the number of scheduled interviews has more than tripled since AAP Connect

hosted the 2014 forum, and am hopeful that increased student participation will continue so that the event can create even more opportunities in the future.”

Twenty-one architecture offices sent 34 alumni interviewers to AAP for the event. A total of 290 interviews with 105 students were held during the first two days of the forum. Students from all architecture degree programs, regardless of their year or level of progress, attended an alumni panel discussion and networking luncheon on the third and final day.

The 10-person panel included an array of alumni— some recent graduates and some with several years of experience in the field. They answered questions, spoke about the various paths they’ve pursued professionally, and highlighted career options.

“I wish I had had this as a student,” says Donny Silberman (B.Arch. ’13), who currently works for Robert A. M. Stern Architects in New York City. “I’ve participated in three Architecture Career Forums to date and have been happy to share insight into the professional realm that exists beyond campus.

This year, I was impressed by a noticeable increase in student engagement as well as AAP’s increased investment in career services.”

Next year’s Architecture Career Forum will be held from April 13 to 16, 2017. The event will kick off with a panel discussion and reception on the first day and will be followed by interviews.AAP

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News20 | Fall 2016

News&Events

Spring 2016 Lectures and Exhibitions aap.cornell.edu/events LECTURES

EXHIBITIONS

After Belonging Åse Anda and Solveig Landa Angela D. Brooks Marco Casamonti Xavier Cha and Rafael Reynoso City and Regional Planning Alumni Panel David Dixon (M.F.A. ’10) Sam Durant Teiger Mentor in the Arts Keller Easterling 1 Dagur Eggertsson 11 Yvonne Farrell Edgar A. Tafel Lecture Series 9 Sou Fujimoto Edgar A. Tafel Lecture Series Rico Gatson 4 Grupo < > Matthew Hall Handel Architects L. Michael Goldsmith Lecture Lesli Hoey 10 Matthias Hollwich George C. Homsy (M.R.P. ’04, Ph.D. CRP ’14) Junya Ishigami Achim Menges Edgar A. Tafel Lecture Series Hannah Messerli Sheila O’Donnell + John Tuomey Antoine Picon 12 Stephen Powers 3 Nina Rappaport FXFOWLE Lecture for Sustainability, Urbanism, and Design Lynn M. Ross (M.R.P. ’01) 6 Deni Ruggeri (M.L.A./ M.R.P. ’01) Joseph Rukus (M.R.P. ’09) Brian Sholis Matthew Silva 5 Luisa Sotomayor Špela Videčnik Michael Wilford Edgar A. Tafel Lecture Series Barbara Brown Wilson Letha Wilson

GIFted Programs Guillaume Kurkdjian Grupo < > Group Show 8 Aurora De Armendi Constanza Alarcón Tennen Marcela Flórido Mariana Garibay Raeke Alva Mooses In a Different Light: Nighttime Photography Yuriy Chernets (M.Arch. ’15) [K]urating the Kura Juliette Dubroca (M.Arch. ’10) and Zachary Tyler Newton (M.Arch. ’10) Political Iconoclasm and Other Forms of Civil Disobedience 2 Deborah Castillo RAW EXPO II: Glitch Shape-Shifting 7 James Kennedy The Dollhouse Heather Benning

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RAW EXPO II: Glitch The second annual RAW EXPO was held on Friday, April 29, in the dome in Milstein Hall, and featured more than 50 projects and objects—planes, robots, furniture, fashion, and models—created by students in design and environmental analysis, engineering, fashion, architecture, art, and hotel administration. The expo is a night of interdisciplinary exchange, chance encounters, and conversations for future collaborations.

Participants are expected to reveal the creative process behind their work—the “RAW,” intermediary, process state. This year’s expo, titled “GLITCH,” was hosted by Medium Design Collective, a multidimensional platform that initiates dialogue among disciplines at Cornell University through design.AAP From left: Cornell University Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (photo / Omar Abdul-Rahim ’19), the Cornell Rocketry Team (photo / Omar Abdul-Rahim ’19), and a view of the RAW EXPO from the balcony in Milstein Hall (photo / Stephanie Cheung ’18).

News20 | Fall 2016

Students

Profile

Refugee Crisis in Berlin Broadens a Student’s Horizons “There were just 60 students in my high school graduating class,” says Jordan Berta (M.Arch. ’16), who grew up in Grand Prairie, Texas, a suburb located between Dallas and Fort Worth. He never imagined he would go from that small school to attend Cornell University, and pursue an education in architecture that would take him from Texas to New York, Zürich, and Berlin.

While on a family trip to New York City and Buffalo when he was 16, his interest in architecture was sparked by the iconic buildings 30 Rockefeller Center and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin D. Martin House, respectively. He admits that may sound clichéd to most architects, but Wright was his first fascination and his interests quickly broadened to others such as Frank Gehry, I. M. Pei, and Louis Kahn. Architecture as a career path was an unexpected possibility to his family, many of whom attended Texas Tech University in Lubbock for music, photography, and history.

But with a keen interest in all areas of design and his mother’s encouragement, in his second year at Texas Tech he entered the architecture program, and graduated in 2011 with a B.S. and a minor in German.

The Texas Tech program included a studio in Berlin—a natural fit for Berta because of his German family heritage. Although he did not foresee it at the time, the architectural practice in Europe that he was introduced to—especially in Berlin—would prove to be significant during his time at Cornell.

While working in Berlin after graduating from Texas Tech, Berta had a chance encounter with a former classmate who encouraged him to apply to Cornell’s master of architecture program for his graduate studies. Cornell was one of just three schools he applied to, and although his passion for architecture was strong, he was pleasantly surprised to be accepted. After an interview via Skype with associate professor in architecture Lily Chi—she also happened to be in Germany at the time—he made the decision to attend AAP. “I have always been the kind of person who is intense about things and topics,” Berta says, remembering the interview. “Professor Chi made it sound like

AAP was invested in the intensity of its students’ ideas and would go to great lengths to support them.”

From the time he arrived at Cornell in the fall of 2012, Berta’s professors helped shape his interests and guided the ideas he would pursue. His first semester core design studio was taught by Edgar A. Tafel Assistant Professor Caroline O’Donnell. “It was a blast,” he says. “All my studios were fantastic—in fact I never had a bad one.” Other professors who became mentors or advisors were Jenny Sabin, the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Assistant Professor in Architecture; Mark Cruvellier, the Nathaniel and Margaret Owings Professor of Architecture and Berta’s academic advisor; and Associate Professor Esra Akcan.

Akcan’s research would have a particular impact on Berta’s studies. Akcan received the 2016 –17 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, where she currently holds a fellowship. Her research on the urban renewal of Berlin’s immigrant neighborhood was directly related to Berta’s thesis topic, which in broad terms focused on narrative falsehoods and an interest in the subversion of those narrative falsehoods between architecture and other contexts.

Initially, Berta’s project developed out of an interest in anachronisms, a topic that emerged from a theory course taught by O’Donnell as well as a semester studio at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH)—the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, a science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and management university in Zürich, Switzerland.

Berta had petitioned successfully for an open visiting student position at ETH instead of an option studio in the spring of 2015. While there, he encountered people who focused his attention on making his topic more socially relevant.

“Zürich and the ETH were excellent, and it was interesting comparing it to Cornell. ETH is very much focused on the craft of making a building, which is why Swiss architecture is so robust and strong. I learned the way European faculties consider architecture, where there is less emphasis on overarching critical narratives and more on the critical detail.

They are more interested in testing and scientificity.”

For their studio project at the ETH, Berta and his classmates were challenged to use local Swiss materials to develop a highly detailed project. Berta and his Swiss partner, Tiziana Schirmer, were given marble from the border region of Ticino, Switzerland, and Lugano, Italy, in a planned intervention to establish a public space that would also generate income for the owner of an abandoned quarry in the tiny rural town of Arzo. The approach they took was unorthodox in the context of the studio and received high praise as a reinterpretation of landscape in the public realm.

“The challenge of the studio was to create a pavilion from local, natural materials. My material was marble, but my site and the surrounding landscape really became more of the actual material in which to intervene, thus we proposed a public pool and pathway, and the professor, Dirk Hebel, supported the initiative.”

Berta returned to Berlin the next semester for an internship at Barkow Leibinger, an American-German architectural practice based in Berlin and New York.

While he was there, the refugee crisis in Germany escalated dramatically, and Berta began to investigate the social implications of asylum and immigration in the context of his thesis.

“Esra [Akcan] really helped me to focus in this area,” he says. “I wondered if perhaps the role that Germany was already playing in the refugee crisis could be part of my thesis, because their response is already, in a way, subverting Germany’s past narrative of how they respond to xenophobia and crisis. The Germans’ commitment to being the voice for human rights in this crisis is a direct reaction to their Nazi and East German past.”

He was struck by the unfolding crisis, particularly when the massive hangars of the disused Tempelhof Airport in Berlin—built under the Nazi regime and later used by the U.S. Air Force base during the Berlin Airlift of 1948–49—became an emergency refugee shelter.

“To me it seemed like an opportunity to engage with the idea that perceptions of the narratives you tell yourself can be altered—they’re not what you thought they were. The refugee crisis in Germany exposes the hegemony and sovereignty of narrative in architecture and the nation-state of the refugee.”

Although he had a clear focus and topic in mind, Berta had a hard time determining the title of his thesis. “It was either going to be Lies of Sovereignty, which was a bit heavy-handed, or, better, Kein Mensch ist Illegal—No Person Is Illegal,” a slogan-turnedcampaign calling for refugees’ rights that began in Germany and has spread to other countries.

Berta says, “Refugees should represent human rights to us. Really, they should be the epitome of human rights. But they become stateless when they expatriate, losing their rights as soon as they leave their home countries. We are in ‘the migrant’s time,’ when across the globe the 50 million refugees displaced is a specific moment. It’s important to bring this conversation into architecture, to ask what architecture can do in response beyond just housing, to include infrastructure for encounter and synthesis of multiple cultures together.”

For Berta, the path that began with a trip to New York City as a teenager and then an undergraduate internship in Berlin, led him to Cornell and ETH in Zürich. That same path has led him back to Berlin, where Berta has returned to work again at Barkow Leibinger. Now, he can imagine someday returning to Cornell as an engaged alumnus, to help guide new architecture students. “After I’ve worked for a while and gained some credentials, perhaps I can come back as a visiting critic,” he says. “I hope to maintain a healthy criticality in how I undertake design and bring that into the way I work and teach.”

“My mentors and professors at Cornell were committed to facilitating the areas of study that I’m specifically interested in, and I think that’s rare,” he says. “It’s why I feel so loyal to Cornell.”

“When I came here I met so many amazing students who had the most fascinating and incredible lives, who had already done things like graffiti in Prague when they were just 17 or founding an Irish rock band,” Berta says. “They made me want to be better than I was, contributing to something bigger than myself.”AAP Patti Witten

False Narratives Reimagined For his thesis, Kein Mensch ist Illegal | No Person Is Illegal, Jordan Berta (M.Arch. â&#x20AC;&#x2122;16) reimagines the site of a mass refugee camp under the hangars of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. Bertaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s intervention addresses the false narratives of sovereignty in architecture and the citizen, which are exposed by the refugee crisis in Germany, and Tempelhof Airport becomes a center of community engagement, hybridized education, and housing at all levels. Urban wrapping is the technique whereby Tempelhof and its users become amalgamated with its environment. photo / Jordan Berta

Students

URS Spring Field Trip Tours Brooklyn In mid-March, a group of urban and regional studies (URS) undergraduates were led by the Organization of Urban and Regional Studies (OURS) on a weekend field trip to Brooklyn.

“One of the themes of the trip was the extraordinary change that Brooklyn has undergone in the last 75 years,” says Thomas J. Campanella, CRP associate professor and director of undergraduate studies, “from industrial crucible to postindustrial basket case with rampant crime and unemployment, to poster child for today’s hipster-driven creative economy.”

Starting at AAP NYC, the group took the East River Ferry to Williamsburg to view the fast-changing waterfront and new infill development along the shore, including SHoP Architects’ Domino Sugar project.

The following day, Campanella led a five-mile walking tour that began at the Fulton Street site of Brooklyn’s first super-tall skyscraper and included visits to the Ingersoll and Farragut projects of the New York City Housing Authority; Cadman Park Plaza (designed in the 1930s by CRP founder and former AAP Dean Gilmore D. Clarke); the Riverside Model Tenements; and Fulton Ferry Landing and Jean Nouvel Jane’s Carousel pavilion. The group gathered for a photo in front of Deborah Kass’s OY/YO sculpture in Brooklyn Bridge Park (master planned in 2005 by noted landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh ’73), and spent the balance of the weekend at the New York City Transit Museum and the Brooklyn Museum.

The mission of OURS is to form and maintain a community among the URS undergraduate students, and to give all students a wider perspective of the field of urban and regional studies through hands-on urban experience.AAP

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M.F.A. Students Find a Global Art Scene in Mexico City

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CRP students in front of Deborah Kass’s OY/YO sculpture in Brooklyn Bridge Park. photo / provided

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Students visit the studio of artist Carlos Amorales. photo / Alva Mooses

Students in the Master of Fine Arts program in the Museo Frida Kahlo, the ruins of Teotihuacán, KurimanDepartment of Art spent their Spring Break in Mexico zutto gallery, and smaller, artist-run spaces like Bikini City, exploring the city’s cultural history and contemWax in the Distrito Federal. “During the trip everyone porary art scene. In its second year, this annual trip found something to respond to, whether it was adds a component of international travel to AAP’s meeting with artists and curators, collecting objects, M.F.A. program that has proven its value in a relatively drawing at the anthropology museum, or visiting short period of time.

Teotihuacán,” Mooses noted.

According to Carl Ostendarp, director of graduate “Bikini Wax stood out for the artists’ level of studies, “The spring abroad trip has become an integral energy and engagement with the city, one another, part of the M.F.A. experience at Cornell. Within the and other artists from around the world,” said span of a week, the students engage with a great Diana Clarke (M.F.A. ’17). “I was impressed with the number of internationally active artists and curators quality of programming and deeply inspired by the and experience exhibitions in gallery, museum, and individuals who make up the practice.” alternative space contexts. The experience is highly Globally recognized sites of interest and an evolving impactful in the ways it inspires and informs individcultural life were among the reasons Mexico City was ual studio practices and the degree to which it allows chosen for the 2016 trip. for insight into the global nature of today’s art world.”

“Mexico City is vast and dense,” said Mooses.

Alva Mooses, a visiting lecturer in printmaking in “There is a provisional quality that is pervasive. The city the Department of Art, traveled with the students and plays an active role in the art created within it, and assisted in their plans for a varied itinerary that took there seems to be a strong dynamic for those who have them to contemporary and historical sites and venues, worked to find their place in the arts there.”AAP including Mexico City’s Zócalo in Centro Histórico,

Student Notes Dual-degree candidate Laureen Andalib (B.F.A./B.S. ’17) was awarded the 2016 National Humanities Prize at the Stanford University Research Conference for her long-term project and thesis, The Intrinsic Code of Language. Her project is a culmination of interdisciplinary research into theories of language, culture, and sociopolitically constructed identities.

Mariko Azis (B.F.A. ’16) secured a $2,000 grant for a youth photography program at the Southside Community Center in Ithaca. The funds were used to purchase cameras and other accessories for the nine middle-school-age boys who participated in the seven-week program. Azis was encouraged to help the program by Bill Gaskins, visiting associate professor of art, who has also volunteered there. The boys’ work was shown at the

Community School of Music and Art in May. In April, students from associate professor of art Gregory Page’s Introduction to Print Media class held an exhibition titled Mise en Place at Cornell Plantations’ Brian C. Nevin Welcome Center.

Culinary herbs found on site visits to Cornell Plantations were the subject matter of the lithographs, reliefs, and screen prints.

AAP students participating in the show included Laura-Bethia Campbell (B.F.A. ’17), Edbert Cheng (B.Arch. ’16), Jaeyong Choi (B.F.A. ’17), Walmir Rodrigues Da Luz Jr. (B.Arch. ’16), Beatrice Goh (B.Arch. ’17), Joon Ho Lee (B.F.A. ’18), Relicque Lott (B.Arch. ’16), Alexandra Plache (B.F.A. ’18), Ji Yoon Rhee (B.F.A. ’18), Daphany Shen (B.Arch. ’17), Sean Steed (B.Arch. ’18), and Jay Yang (B.F.A. ’18).

Research proposals by Katherine Chen (B.Arch. ’18) and Justin Foo (B.Arch. ’18) were awarded Frederic Conger Wood Summer Research Fellowships by the Cornell Institute for European Studies (CIES). Foo traveled to Spain to investigate his topic, “Utopian Grids: Urban Design as Social Reform in Barcelona,” and Chen went to Paris and Berlin to research her project, “Urban Trajectories: Walking and Mapping in the Historic City.” CIES is a program of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and offers summer programs to eligible undergraduate and graduate students across Cornell.

In April, Zachary Calbo-Jackson (B.Arch. ’19) was awarded the New York Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects’ (NOMA) Diversity in the School of Architecture Award. Calbo-Jackson and

Luciana Ruiz (B.Arch. ’19) are the copresidents of the Cornell chapter of NOMAS, the student division of NOMA. The students will travel to Los Angeles for the team competition held during the annual NOMA conference in October.

My Sky Is Floor Scented, a vehicle-mounted, 4,000-watt searchlight projecting from a historical site in the City of Ithaca, was the work of Jared L. Curtis (B.Arch. ’16). Partially supported by the Cornell Council for the Arts, Curtis shone the floodlight on the nearly demolished Ithaca Gun Factory’s surviving icon—the smokestack—in April. The projection from the site was visible across the city as more than 100 visitors engaged with the installation on the ground.

Under the advisement of associate professors Andrea Simitch and Arthur Ovaska, Walmir Rodrigues Da Luz Jr.’s (B.Arch. ’15) thesis project, “NYC 2050 City Masterplan,” won the silver Urban Planning and Urban Design prize, in the 2016 A’Design Award and Competition. The winners are rewarded with a trophy, a PR campaign, marketing assistance, exhibition of their work, and inclusion in a yearbook that is distributed to the press.

Jared Enriquez, Ph.D. candidate in CRP, and Sara Davis (M.R.P. ’15) were named 2016 U.S. Department of Agriculture ThinkWater Fellows. They are part of an inaugural cohort of 11 researchers from across various disciplines at Cornell to participate in an intensive program that involves learning and applying systems thinking to their water-related research.

Work created by architecture students in Water and the City II, the fall 2015 studio of Gensler Visiting Critic Kunlé Adeyemi and visiting critic Suzanne Lettieri (M.Arch. ’11), was exhibited at the 2016 Venice Biennale in May. Lagos Market Bridge, by Rina Kang (B.Arch. ’17), and Floating Tower,

by Sida Zhang (M.Arch. ’16), were part of Adeyemi’s exhibition of the Makoko Floating School, which received a Silver Lion award at the biennale. Also part of the exhibition was Terra Pericolosa, a work by Jessica Jiang (B.Arch. ’17), Aashti Miller (B.Arch. ’17), and Beatrice Goh (B.Arch. ’17); and Hiking Circuit, work that was created in the spring 2016 studio, Lo-Res: Architectural Strategies of Localized Resilience, taught

by Lettieri and visiting critic in architecture Michael Jefferson (M.Arch. ’11). Three projects created by architecture students

in the fall 2014 studio Floating Cities: Mekong, taught by associate professors of architecture Lily Chi and Jeremy Foster, were included in the exhibition: Aquacultural + Urban Housing

by Luke Erickson (M.Arch. ’16), with Yongxiao Liu (M.Arch. ’16) and Apexa Patel (M.Arch. ’16); Building Resilience: Forest Archipelago by Lucas Greco (M.Arch. ’16), Andreea Gulerez (M.Arch. ’16), and Sophia Szagala (M.Arch. ’16); and Housing + Market by Johanna Grazel (B.Arch. ’15), with Nikki Liao (B.Arch. ’15) and Elena Toumayan (B.Arch. ’15).

A paper on user fees by CRP students Michelle Aoko Juma (B.S. URS ’16), Adna Karabegovic (M.R.P. ’16), and Rachel Rhodes (M.P.A. ’16) won the Marykathryn Kubat Award from the American Association for Budget and Program Analysis.

The paper, originally written

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Historic Preservation Planning Student Helps Celebrate 50 Years of Historic Ithaca Historic Ithaca (HI) celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, and historic preservation planning student Ana Huckfeldt (M.A. HPP ’16) helped bring the history to life.

Huckfeldt’s role in the anniversary celebration started when AAP Connect, the college’s office dedicated to assisting AAP students in locating jobs and internships, helped her secure an internship with the organization in the summer of 2015.

“My historic preservation planning work focuses on community engagement in local preservation,” says Huckfeldt. “I was interested in having real ties to the Ithaca community, and this internship was a great way to learn about how preservation in Ithaca has worked.”

Huckfeldt’s role at HI was to research the history of the organization, and design exhibition panels for a 50th anniversary celebration that illustrated its milestones, as well as those of historic preservation in Ithaca. The 10 panels Huckfeldt designed made up the heart of the exhibition. Each panel focused on a single topic including the Clinton House, the founding of HI, DeWitt Park Historic District, St. James AME Zion Church, the State Theatre, and projects in rural Tompkins County, among others.

“I have a fine arts background, so was happy to be able to produce these materials,” she says. “I learned about the importance of community engagement in local preservation work, and saw how this support makes the work of a nonprofit possible.”

The panels were on display at HI from March 1 to March 27.AAP

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Rong Receives 2016 KPF Traveling Fellowship

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Ana Huckfeldt (M.A. HPP ’16) with the exhibition she helped create at Historic Ithaca.

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superCloud (2016), a proposed data center in Svalbard, Norway, was part of Rong’s portfolio submission for the KPF fellowship.

Baker Field Trip In March, second-year students in the Cornell Baker Program in Real Estate visited Vancouver, British Colombia, on their first international trek.

During the five-day trip, students met with Larry Beasley, former codirector of planning for the City of Vancouver; Vancouver City Council Member Gordon Price; Concord Pacific’s Senior Vice President of Development Peter Webb; and other city planners, developers, and real estate professionals.

At left: Peter Webb reviews the history of the development of Vancouver with Baker Program students. photo /Jesse Winter

for a class taught by CRP’s Professor Mildred Warner, received the Graduate Student Research Award, which carries a $1,000 prize.

5:871–890. It uses sophisticated geographically weighted regression to look at spatial diversity in local government fiscal effort across the U.S.

Students of Professor Mildred Warner coauthored and published papers with her this spring.

A paper coauthored with Yunji Kim (Ph.D. CRP ’17) was published in the journal Public Administration. Titled “Pragmatic Municipalism: Local Government Service Delivery in the Great Recession,” the paper determines that local governments in the U.S. are practicing a “pragmatic municipalism” to maintain services in the face of increasing fiscal stress. Also with Warner, Yuanshou Xu (M.R.P. ’12/Ph.D. ’18) coauthored “Does Devolution Crowd Out Development?

A Spatial Analysis of U.S. Local Government Fiscal Effort,” which appeared in the journal Environment and Planning A 48,

A research grant from the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s collection has been awarded to Gökhan Kodalak (Ph.D. HAUD ’19) for his proposal, “Heretical Confluence of Cedric Price and Baruch Spinoza: Towards an Affective Architecture.” Kodalak is advised by associate professor in architecture, Esra Akcan.

The 2015 Manon Michels Einaudi grant from Cornell’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and the Cornell Institute for European Studies was awarded to Anna Mascorella (Ph.D. HAUD ’19). Mascorella traveled to Rome to research her dissertation, which reconsiders the National Fascist Party’s urban interventions in the city by

examining the regime’s negotiation of Rome’s Baroque architecture, urbanism, and rhetoric.

A Division Council Award from the American Planning Association was awarded to Amanda Micklow (Ph.D. CRP ’19) and CRP Professor Mildred Warner for their project Planning Through a Gender Lens: Inclusive Planning for Aging and Livable Communities. The Contribution to the Planning Profession Award recognizes outstanding skill-based or knowledge-based professional content, and measurable visibility to the profession.

Whitten Overby (Ph.D. HAUD ’16) was the recipient of the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools (NAGS) Master’s Thesis Award 2015 –16.

The $1,000 award is given in recognition of an outstanding master’s thesis that has been

produced by a student at one of its member institutions. Overby’s thesis, “The Seekers,” examines “white, middle-class, heterosexual families ensconced in the fantasia of suburbia.” It was the unanimous choice of the award committee. Overby was honored at the NAGS annual conference in Waterloo, Ontario, in April.

For Michael Raspuzzi (B.Arch. ’16) the spring semester brought awards and honors for academic work and photography, and grants to support student entrepreneurship projects as well as research in Iceland. He led the nonprofit company Life Changing Labs (LCL) Makea-thon as managing director, winning a Cornell Community Partnership Funding Board grant and raising matching funds to support more than 120 Cornell and local high school students and participants in a 24-hour collaborative design hardware

Helena Rong (B.Arch. ’17) was one of three winners of the prestigious 2016 Kohn Pederson Fox (KPF) Traveling Fellowship. Over the summer, Rong traveled to eight sites around the world, including Seinäjoki, Finland; Fordlândia and Brasília, Brazil; and Songdo, South Korea, among others.

Rong’s extensive itinerary was part of her proposal to investigate and remediate what she has described as “strange urbanisms” in sites where she has identified “discrepancies between often utopian blueprints envisioned by great architects and their unexpected realities.”

“Utopian urbanism becomes strange when the site or structure falls out of context and fails to address contemporary needs or keep up with the constantly changing demands of the world,” said Rong in her project proposal. She documented her trip through intensive research and site visits, photographs, and analytic drawings. “Using these insights as a foundation for my understanding of strange urbanism, I formed my own agenda to speculate on ways of remediating these urban conditions.”

Winners of the competition are selected by portfolio review.

Rong’s winning portfolio featured various projects that addressed several of the sites she visited this summer.

“Helena’s portfolio was not merely an assemblage of beautiful and varied design projects; rather, it came together as one meticulously constructed and unified body of work,” commented Mark Cruvellier, department chair and Nathaniel and Margaret Owings Professor of Architecture. “From imagined reconstructions of the flooded Campo Marzio in historic Rome to skyscraper IT-data-server farms in the Svalbard Islands, the portfolio effectively represented Helena’s creative work and graphical abilities in support of her written travel proposal to visit, examine, and project upon utopian cities and landscapes.”

Each year, KPF awards three travel grants to students who are in their penultimate year at one of 26 design schools, allowing them to broaden their education through a summer of travel before their final year at school. Each winner receives $8,000 for their trip and another $2,000 after submitting a report about their travels.AAP

“Hackathon,” with Andrew Moorman (B.Arch. ’16) as the technical lead. During the Big Idea Competition in April, his LCL team hosted a new venture challenge in collaboration with Entrepreneurship@Cornell, where the team branded, marketed, organized, and provided mentoring for the 12 competing companies. Raspuzzi’s print photograph, Meandering at Midnight, was featured as a finalist in the annual State of the Art Gallery Regional Juried Show in Ithaca. Raspuzzi visited the University of Reykjavik in Iceland for 10 days under a Cornell Tradition Research Grant to study innovation in entrepreneurship.

He was also one of 10 seniors in the graduating class of 2016 recognized with a Cornell Tradition Senior Award for achievements in leadership, service, and academic excellence, and he was named a commencement Degree Marshall.

Pauline Shongov (B.F.A. ’18) was admitted to the student symposium of the 2016 Telluride Film Festival in Telluride, Colorado, a competitive program that admits 50 film enthusiasts (professionals and students) of geographical and cultural diversity to participate in a weekend-long program of screenings and discussions with influential film directors at one of the world’s premier film festivals. The student symposium was held in September.

“Putting the Supplier in Housing Supply: An Overview of the Growth and Concentration of Large Homebuilders in the United States (1990–2007),” by Peter Wissoker (Ph.D. CRP ’17), appeared in the journal Housing Policy Debate. The paper is an examination of how home building went from a local and regional industry to one where national-scale firms played an increasingly large part— especially in states that saw the largest housing bubbles.

Chapel of Longing, a project

by Justin Wadge (B.Arch. ’15), received the award for best student work in the annual Religious Art and Architecture Design Awards. Cosponsored

by Faith & Form magazine and the Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art, and Architecture, the annual awards honor the best in architecture, liturgical design, and art for religious spaces.

News20 | Fall 2016

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Happy Birthday Tour Katya Savelieva (B.F.A./B.A. â&#x20AC;&#x2122;16), Gastronom No. 1 (2016), printed canvas, bungee cords, grommets, floor decals, dimensions varied. On display in John Hartell Gallery in May, as part of the B.F.A. thesis exhibition titled Happy Birthday Tour.

photo / Omar Abdul-Rahim ’19

Students

photo / Tim Ryan (B.Arch. ’17)

Architecture Students Design New High School for Village in Honduras In a remote village in central Honduras, students who graduate from elementary school must walk two hours along hilly, rock-covered dirt roads to reach the nearest high school. For many of the village’s youth who traditionally work on their family farms after sixth grade, the distance alone puts a premature end to their education.

Soon, they may not have to travel as far when a new high school, designed by two architecture students, is built. Liam Martin (B.Arch. ’17) (above, standing at right) and Tim Ryan (B.Arch. ’17) were selected to design the school for El Rodeito— population 210—and traveled there during the 2015 spring break and last summer. The high school is a project of Mayor Potencial at Cornell, a nonprofit organization founded by Nancy Bell ’09, who grew up in the village, with a mission to improve access to education in rural Latin America.

Mayor Potencial (which translates to “greatest potential”) is raising the $30,000 needed to start construction on the school.

The four cinder-block buildings making up the campus will include two classroom buildings for the

Medium Design Collective Medium Design Collective, an interdisciplinary student group, published the first volume of Medium Design Review in April. The issue “exposes the diverse design pockets on campus and provides a unified perspective on Cornell’s creative community,” according to the Letter from the Editor. The issue includes work and stories of interdisciplinary collaboration and profiles of “classmates, colleagues, and mentors,” as well as spotlights on the first student design competition, “Mechanism,” and Cornell’s first interdisciplinary design panel, “Rethinking Design.” The staff of Medium Design Review includes Angela MorenoLong (B.S. URS ’16), editor; Melody Rose Stein (B.F.A. ’16), administrative director; Garrett Craig-Lucas (B.S. URS/LA ’17), and Emily Teall (B.F.A. ’16), editorial directors; Andres Romero Pompa (B.Arch. ’17), Daniel Preston (B.Arch. ’17), and Pamela Chueh (B.Arch. ’17), creative directors; Rebecca Allen (B.A./B.F.A. ’16), Jeisson Apolo (B.Arch./ B.S. URS ’16), Isabella Crowley (B.S. URS ’18), Rebecca Jackson ’19, Mabel Lawrence ’19, Rebecca Liu ’19, and Weihong Rong ’17, editorial; Tina He ’19, Dina Kaganer ’18, and Maggie O’Keefe (B.F.A. ’20), creative.AAP

high school and primary school, a computer lab and library, and a kitchen and cafeteria. They will be sited on a sloping terrace featuring play areas with curving paths, a school garden, and two congregation areas for school assemblies and public meetings.

Unique design features include performative drop ceilings constructed from locally grown loofah, to reduce noise between classrooms and direct air movement during the hottest part of the day. Security grates on windows will be transformed into sculptures fabricated by local metal workers.

“Maybe the classroom windows could illustrate parts of the agricultural process,” said Ryan. “For the library, the windows could portray Mayan myths with images of various creatures and goddesses, to form a more fantastical space.”

Martin says the experience of working on the project in El Rodeito has changed his career goals.

“Seeing the potential impact we can have, even before construction, convinced me that this is the kind of work I want to do as an architect. Design is needed much more by people who have less, and I would rather go where I’m really needed.”AAP

2015 –16 Student Academic Awards and Prizes Architecture Abadan Graduate Award Haoran Wang (M.Arch. ’20) Addison G. Crowley (B.L.Arch. ’38) Prize Justin Foo (B.Arch. ’18) A. Henry Detweiler Scholarship Fund Elvan Cobb (Ph.D. HAUD ’17) Gökhan Kodalak (Ph.D. HAUD ’19) Athanasiou Geolas (M.A. Ph.D. HAUD ’21) Aslihan Gunhan (Ph.D. HAUD ’22) Margot Lystra (M.A. HAUD ’13, Ph.D. HAUD ’18) Anna Mascorella (Ph.D. HAUD ’19) Whitten Overby (M.A. HAUD ’13, Ph.D. HAUD ’19) A.I.A. Certificate of Merit Mitsuto Mori (M.Arch. ’16) Karl Pops (B.Arch. ’16) A.I.A. Henry Adams Medal and Certificate of Merit Sophia Szagala (M.Arch. ’16) Daniel Toretsky (B.Arch. ’16) Alpha Rho Chi Tamara Jamil (B.Arch. ’16) Apexa Patel (M.Arch. ’16) Belcher-Baird Architectural Design Award Eliana Drier (M.Arch. ’20) Xiaoxue Ma (M.Arch. ’20) Bradford and Phyllis Friedman Perkins Graduate Award Catherine Breen (M.Arch. ’20)

Charles Goodwin Sands Memorial Award Silver medal: Rachel Tan (B.Arch. ’16) Bronze medal: Erica Alonzo (B.Arch. ’16) Cameron Neuhoff (B.Arch. ’16) Daniel Toretsky (B.Arch. ’16) Clifton Beckwith Brown Memorial Medal Hyemin Jang (B.Arch. ’16) Douglas W. Hocking and Melinda H. Abrams Award Alexander Terry (M.Arch. ’20) Earl R. Flansburgh Merit Award Osehikhueme Etomi (M.Arch. ’19) Ramses Gonzalez (M.Arch. ’20) Christopher Yi (M.Arch. ’20) Edward Palmer York Memorial Prize Ihwa Choi (B.Arch. ’20) Oonagh Davis (B.Arch. ’20) Yue (Lancer) Gu (B.Arch. ’20) Claire Guffey (B.Arch. ’20) Aileene Han (B.Arch. ’20) Ruth Marcotte (B.Arch. ’20) Ziqing Xu (B.Arch. ’20) Elliot M. Glass Graduate Award Hafsa Muhammad (M.Arch. ’20) Eschweiler Prize for Merit and Distinction in M.Arch.

Design Studio Luke Erickson (M.Arch, ’16) Mitsuto Mori (M.Arch. ’16) Sophia Szagala (M.Arch. ’16) Han Zhang (M.Arch. ’16) Helen Fagan Tyler Graduate Fellowship in Architecture Mwanzaa Brown (M.Arch. ’19) Samuel Capps (M.Arch. ’19) Tess Clancy (M.Arch. ’19)

Osehikhueme Etomi (M.Arch. ’19) Hyojin Lee (M.Arch.II ’17) Jingsi Li (M.Arch.II ’17) Lingling Liu (M.Arch. ’19) Lingzhe Lu (M.Arch. ’19) Yue Ma (M.Arch. ’19) Heather Mauldin (M.Arch. ’19) Lu (Cheryl) Xu (M.Arch. ’19) Linjun Yu (M.Arch. ’19)

Olive Tjaden Scholarship Gary Esposito (M.Arch. ’19) Konstantinos Petrakos (M.Arch.II ’17)

John Hartell Graduate Award for Art and Architecture Jamie Mitchell (M.Arch. ’19) Konstantinos Petrakos (M.Arch.II ’17) Alireza Shojakhani (M.Arch. ’19)

Robert D. MacDougall Memorial Scholarship Elvan Cobb (Ph.D. HAUD ’17) Salvatore Dellaria (M.A./Ph.D. HAUD ’21) Athanasiou Geolas (M.A./Ph.D. HAUD ’21) Gökhan Kodalak (Ph.D. HAUD ’19) Margot Lystra (M.A. HAUD ’13, Ph.D. HAUD ’18) Josi Ward (Ph.D. HAUD ’17)

Kittleman Graduate Award in Architecture, Art, and Planning Linshen Xie (M.Arch.II ’17) M.Arch.II Award for Outstanding Performance in Architecture Nicholas Doermann (M.Arch.II ’16) Binsi Li (M.Arch.II ’16) Fahir Burak Unel (M.Arch.II ’16) Mary M. Lyons Graduate Fellowship in Architecture Kun Bi (M.Arch. ’19) Samuel Capps (M.Arch. ’19) Stephen Clond (M.Arch. ’19) Xiaoyan Dong (M.Arch.II ’17) Alexandre Mecattaf (M.Arch. ’19) Marawan Omar (M.Arch.II ’17) Matthew L. Witte Graduate Award Emma Boudreau ’16 (M.Arch. ’20) Merrill Presidential Scholar Daniel Toretsky (B.Arch. ’16)

Paul Dickinson Prize Magdalena Zink (B.Arch. ’19) RGB Endowed Graduate Award Nicolas Leonard (M.Arch. ’20)

Robert James Eidlitz Travel Fellowship Alberto Embriz de Salvatierra (B.Arch. ’14) Luke Erickson (M.Arch. ’16) Cameron Neuhoff (B.Arch. ’16) Apexa Patel (M.Arch. ’15) Daniel Salomon (B.Arch. ’12) Lea Stagno (M.Arch.II ’15) Justin Wadge (B.Arch. ’15) Ruth Bentley and Richmond Harold Shreve Award Stefany Amasifuen (M.Arch. ’16) Luke Erickson (M.Arch. ’16) Mitsuto Mori (M.Arch. ’16) Lily-Love Toppar (M.Arch. ’15) Sheinfeld Lindenfeld International Graduate Fellowship in Architecture Isabel Branas Jarque (M.Arch. ’20)

Stephen W. Jacobs Fund Salvatore Dellaria (M.A./Ph.D. HAUD ’21) Susan T. Rodriguez Graduate Award Mwanzaa Brown (M.Arch. ’19) Stefani Johnson (M.Arch. ’20)

Edith Adams and Walter King Stone Memorial Prize Laureen Andalib (B.F.A. ’17) Jaeyong Choi (B.F.A. ’17) Veronica Constable (B.F.A. ’17) Naima Kazmi (B.F.A. ’17) Tiffany Li (B.F.A. ’17) Yuxi Xiao (B.S./B.F.A. ’17)

Tui Pranich and Lucilo Pena Graduate Award Daniel (Max) Piersol (M.Arch. ’20)

Elsie Dinsmore Popkin ’58 Art Award Ekaterina Savelieva (B.A./B.F.A. ’16)

William S. Downing Prize Ngaire Stuart Gongora (B.Arch. ’16)

Faculty Medal of Art Mariko Azis (B.A./B.F.A. ’16)

Art Charles Baskerville Painting Award Carolyn Fraser (M.F.A. ’16) Frances Gallardo Varela (M.F.A. ’16) Charles Goodwin Sands Memorial Award (Bronze medal) Melody Stein (B.F.A. ’16) David R. Bean Prize in Fine Arts Briana Coleman (B.F.A. ’18) Kylie Corwin (B.F.A./B.S. ’19) Max Haughey (B.F.A. ’18) Ariella Lindenfeld (B.F.A. ’18) Madeleine Popkin (B.F.A. ’18) Lauryn Smith (B.F.A. ’18) Department of Art Distinguished Achievement Award Rosebelle Tenaglia (B.F.A. ’16)

Arch R. Winter Graduate Fellowship Melanie Sand (Ph.D. CRP ’19) Department of City and Regional Planning Graduate Community Service Award Adna Karabegovic (M.R.P. ’16) Annie Pease (M.R.P. ’16) John W. Reps Award Sean McGee (B.S. ’14, M.A. HPP ’16) Pamela Mikus Graduate Fellowship Zeynep Goksel ’18 (M.R.P. ’18)

Gibian Rosewater Traveling Research Award Naomi Edmark (B.A./B.F.A. ’18) Pauline Shongov (B.A./B.F.A. ’18)

Peter B. Andrews Memorial Thesis Prize Maria Brito (M.A. HPP ’15) Taru (M.R.P. ’15)

John Hartell Graduate Award for Art and Architecture Luca Spano (M.F.A. ’16)

Portman Family Graduate Student Award Alia Fierro (M.R.P. ’16)

John “Kip” Brady Memorial Award Vittoria Cutbirth (B.F.A. ’16) Xinyi Liu (B.A./B.F.A. ’16)

Robert P. Liversidge III Memorial Book Award Jessica Masters (M.R.P. ’16) Sivan Naaman (M.R.P. ’16)

Michael Rapuano Memorial Award Mariko Azis (B.A./B.F.A. ’16)

Thomas W. Mackesey Award Megan Pulver ’11 (M.R.P. ’16) Meicheng Wang (M.R.P. ’16)

CRP Addison G. Crowley Patrick Braga (B.A./B.S. URS ’17) American Institute of Certified Planners Outstanding Student Award Jaclyn Hochreiter (M.R.P. ’16)

Urban and Regional Studies Academic Achievement Award Peter Duba (B.S. URS ’16) Roya Sabri (B.A./B.S. URS ’16) Alexa Singer (B.S. URS ’16) Urban and Regional Studies Community Service Award Daniela Cardenas (B.S. URS ’16) Angela Moreno-Long (B.S. URS ’16)

M.R.P. Students Participate in Urban Social Forum in Indonesia In December, CRP students Sarah Dougherty (M.R.P. ’16), Adna Karabegovic (M.R.P. ’16), and Anne Pease (M.R.P. ’16) traveled to Surabaya, Indonesia, to participate in the third annual Urban Social Forum (USF) conference, and conduct research for individual projects with residents in various areas of Java.

Aimed at promoting awareness of urban issues, improving understanding of current practices, and promoting collaboration, the USF is an annual event that provides an opportunity for participants to debate ideas, exchange experiences and knowledge, and meet and network with other leaders and organizations working on pressing urban issues throughout Indonesia.

“We saw the new leaders of social change at the USF,” says Pease. “They are young people, academics, and government officials collaborating to share ideas, and people discussing using new technology to improve waste collection, bike commuting, and targeted strategies to increase female participation.”

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Dougherty and Karabegovic presented “The Advocacy Planning Guide”—research focused on the opportunities that exist within Indonesia for collaborative planning— to the participatory budgeting panel.

After attending the conference, Dougherty traveled to Semarang, and then to Surakarta (Solo) and Yogyakarta in Java to conduct research for her exit project, which focuses on gender dimensions in local climate change processes.

Pease and Karabegovic presented findings from previous workshops to community leaders in Solo—in particular, those regarding security and shelter, sanitation, and community participation. The pair also conducted new research as they interviewed leaders in the communities that they worked in previously to gain a better understanding of the participatory budgeting process.

Funding for the trip was partially provided by the Cornell Southeast Asia Program.AAP

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Sarah Dougherty (M.R.P. ’16), in the right foreground, at the Urban Social Forum in Indonesia. photo / Anne Pease (M.R.P. ’16)

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From left: Sarah Dougherty (M.R.P. ’16), Eileen Munsch (M.R.P. ’16), Erin Frederickson (M.A. HPP ’17), and Sivan Naaman (M.R.P. ’16) lay a new stone patio at Lynn Hall. photo / provided

Historic Preservation Planning’s Annual Work Weekend Takes Students to Lynn Hall In April, Associate Professor Jeffrey Chusid and a group of more than 30 graduate students in the department of City and Regional Planning spent a long weekend in Port Allegany, Pennsylvania, working at Lynn Hall, a National Historic Register Property, for the annual Historic Preservation Planning (HPP) Work Weekend.

Work projects at Lynn Hall included reroofing, water feature repair, cork panel installation, stone terrace work, and tuck-pointing an artisan-designed stone wall. The building’s owners estimated that the students’ work cut six months from the restoration schedule for the building, as well as providing professional guidance and suggestions.

In addition to the HPP students, the group was joined by several M.R.P. students, HPP director and professor Michael Tomlan, and HPP alumnus Mahyar Hadighi (M.A. HPP ’14). Also visiting the project were the head of the HPP alumni organization, Katelin Olson (M.A. HPP ’09), and former HPP student Natalie Franz.

Previous locations for Work Weekend have included Ellis Island, New Orleans, West Virginia, and Massachusetts, among many other places.AAP

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M.F.A. Group Exhibition Leaving (2016), by Luca Spano (M.F.A. ’16), was part of the Department of Art’s 2016 M.F.A. group exhibition held in May at the Caelum Gallery in New York City. The exhibition, Something Came Over Me, included work

by Madeleine Cichy (M.F.A. ’17), Stephanie Clark (M.F.A. ’17), Diana Clarke (M.F.A. ’17), Carolyn Benedict Fraser (M.F.A. ’16), Frances Gallardo (M.F.A. ’16), Jesse Kreuzer (M.F.A. ’16), Ann Lee (M.F.A. ’16), Jerry Lim (M.F.A. ’17), Annie Raccuglia (M.F.A. ’16), Na Chainkua Reindorf (M.F.A. ’17), Clayton Skidmore (M.F.A. ’17), and Spano.AAP

News20 | Fall 2016

Faculty&Staff Profile

Photography in Motion “I’ve always been intuitive about movement, the motion of things,” says Associate Professor Barry Perlus. From a young age, he would regularly take things apart to see how all the pieces moved together to create a functioning machine.

Now, after 47 years as a professional photographer and professor, movement is still at the heart of his work.

His most recent project focusing on Jantar Mantars, a group of historic observatories in India, uses panoramic, digital equipment to capture the buildings the Indians used to track the movement of the planets and stars.

The integration of science into his work is not surprising. Growing up in the 1960s in central New Jersey, he had a “split affinity” in high school. He liked art, and took art classes whenever he could fit them in, and was made photography editor for his high school otherwise had. “I shot a tractor parts catalog and yearbook. Photography instruction wasn’t offered at made it look glamorous; I did a shoot for a company his school, so he began teaching himself and visited museums and galleries during trips to New York City— that made maternity undergarments—which was a very interesting experience. And I built a diverse but his school had more support for science and engineering, which, at the time, presented a clearer future. portfolio of work.”

Perlus took that experience and, in 1975, started “I was very good at physics—movement, weight, and a commercial studio with a longtime friend, mass,” he says, “and while that sometimes was applied Barney Taxel. “We started pretty much from scratch, to art, art was not a very strongly taught subject in my borrowing from our parents to buy used photo school district. In the 1960s we were competing with equipment. And we didn’t really have any accounts the Russians in science and engineering—so school of our own—we had to create a book and just put really encouraged me in that area.” ourselves out there,” he says. Little by little, using With a scientific career in mind, Perlus chose Case their contacts from previous jobs, they made their Institute in Cleveland for college. But as he got further way into the agencies and began to secure new clients into his studies, he became less and less interested in and create a successful business. making science or engineering his career focus. He “But then I got bored,” Perlus says. “I was teaching had joined the college newspaper as a photographer a class in the evening once a week . . . and I loved and was hired as a freelancer by the college communiit—I would come away feeling so energized and cations office. emotionally charged—and I remembered a moment “I found the expressive aspect of photography comfrom one of the workshops I had taken with Minor pelling,” he says. “It was a way to convey something White, when I felt, and even said out loud, ‘someday about what I was experiencing and discovering about I’m going to teach.’ That was a real epiphany, and the world I was growing into.” pretty much set my direction.” He decided to pursue His work for the communications office was highly an M.F.A., sold his share of the business to Taxel, and successful. “There were a lot of important people enrolled at Ohio University (OU). coming through the campus—presidential candidates, Graduate school was an eye-opening experience. members of the Black Power movement,” he recalls.

“I had to do some unlearning, and I failed my first “I got more and more assignments—I was a kid, so review,” he says. “But it was a special opportunity nobody paid any attention to me, and no one was selfto become a student again. OU was one of the oldest conscious. I was getting these on-the-spot photojourprograms in the U.S., with well-established photogranalistic scenes that the university really liked.” phy and printmaking departments, and I was able During his sophomore year, he took a photo class to do a third year of study, exploring artists’ books, with an adjunct professor named Nicholas Hlobeczy— a student and friend of Minor White. “The course used letterpress, and dye-transfer printing.” Perlus graduated in May 1984, and was hired into a one-year an experimental approach developed by White, based position at Cornell. on White’s experience with Zen Buddhism and the Recognizing that the demand for a photo instructor teachings of Russian philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff. They was high, Perlus’s position was made permanent used photography as a way to practice ‘heightened the following year. He was able to bring something awareness,’ as White called it,” says Perlus. “It was an new to photo instruction, introducing students to approach to creative work that treated one’s own state his specialties of large-format cameras and studio of awareness as part of the process—something that I techniques drawn from his experience in commercial have continued to explore in my work and life.” and advertising photography.

Case Institute and Western Reserve University had By the early 1990s, the introduction of the computer merged the year Perlus matriculated, and, in 1969, and digital imaging devices provided new opportunities the university announced the creation of the Undergraduate Scholar Program, a way for students to create for both art students and faculty. Following fellow art professor Stan Bowman—“he was on the cutting edge their own curriculum. Perlus was accepted into the of digital imaging”—and then with the encouragement program in 1970, crafted his own major incorporating of Professor Don Greenberg in computer graphics, photography, art history, urban studies, and archiPerlus began to learn the new technology. He received tecture, and graduated in 1972. Along the way, he two Faculty Advisory Board on Information Technolopicked up enough freelance photography work to fully gies grants to teach a class with Margaret Corbit, support himself. then director of outreach for the Theory Center, on After graduation, through his ongoing connection virtual worlds, and how to explore interactive media with university communications, Perlus was introthrough art. duced to a young writer named Alan Glazen who was The movement into digital also changed Perlus’s starting his own advertising agency and wanted to personal work. During a study leave in India in 1988, have a photographer on staff. Working with Glazen, while photographing ancient temples, he saw the Perlus was able to get experience he wouldn’t have

Jantar Mantar observatories for the first time. He captured them in abstract, black-and-white photos using conventional equipment. “The Jantar Mantar wasn’t originally on my itinerary, but I fell in love with it,” he says. “I knew I wanted to return and work more extensively.”

His chance came in 2001, when he returned to India with both a conventional wide-field camera and his first digital panoramic rig, a Nikon COOLPIX coupled with a special panoramic tripod head. “My work in film-based photography had been moving toward wider and wider views, using a panoramic format, but in one day I proved to myself that the digital panorama was the way to go,” he says. “It was so completely immersive, and removed the problem of the conventional frame—I could capture multiple, panoramic views as if someone was turning their head to take it all in.”

The new technology set his path for the project. He learned web design, created a website (jantarmantar.org), and has been presenting the project using digital projections inside planetariums across the country.

Perlus has also applied his strong belief in interdisciplinary exploration to his position as associate dean. Appointed to the role in 2008, his focus has been academic issues and student well-being, and on working across the university to make interdisciplinary, concurrent degrees easier for students to access.

“Since the 70s, B.F.A. students have had the opportunity to complete a second degree with arts and sciences or engineering,” he says. “But students want more options—they want to pursue concurrent degrees in other colleges like Human Ecology or CALS, with majors including communications, fiber science and apparel design, landscape architecture, or natural resources. And it makes sense that they should be able to do that—it makes them stronger scholars.” Perlus created a working group of registrars and admissions personnel in several colleges who developed a formal policy and set of procedures enabling more students across the university to take advantage of the concurrent degree option.

Another accomplishment as associate dean has been developing and supporting AAP Connect, the college’s career services group. Perlus’s experience starting the business with Taxel continues to resonate with him. “I want students to be prepared, to know how to present themselves,” he says. “I want them to learn that to get a job, you have to go and talk to people. You can’t pressure them and you can’t act needy. You need to know how to speak, to present your work, to be friendly, and to be patient. Because if you believe in your work and do what you love—just do what you really love—the rest will fall into place.”AAP Rebecca Bowes

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Speculative City Bradley Nathanson (B.Arch. ’18) presents during Visiting Critic David Moon’s third-year studio, Speculative City—Crisis, Turmoil, and Projections in Architecture.

Front reviewers include (from left) Andrew Holder, Visiting Critic Julian Palacio, Visiting Critic Suzanne Lettieri, Professor Mary Woods, Chris Battaglia (M.Arch. ’16), and Moon.

CRP Faculty Receive Fellowships for Sustainability Research

Faculty&Staff

Cornell’s David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future (ACSF) named CRP faculty members Neema Kudva and Mildred Warner to an interdisciplinary group of faculty-in-residence fellows this fall.

The fellows receive a semester of teaching leave and research funding to pursue projects related to sustainability, including exploratory research, artistic work, public engagement, books and articles, and course development.

In addition to the fellowship appointments, ACSF Faculty Fellow and Professor of City and Regional Planning Kieran Donaghy joined the ACSF as faculty director of economic development on July 1. Donaghy also serves as the director of graduate studies in

regional science. His research is focused on sustainable economic development from the perspectives of a regional scientist and a humanitarian.

ACSF was founded in 2010 by an endowment from David and Pat Atkinson that was at the time the largest donation in U.S. academic history in the sustainability area. The center’s mission is to “discover and implement sustainable solutions to world needs for reliable energy, a resilient environment, and responsible economic development,” and to connect researchers to external partners such as CARE, the Environmental Defense Fund, Oxfam, and the Nature Conservancy. Its major grant programs and activities spark interdisciplinary collaborations across Cornell.AAP

New York City Department of Parks and Recreation Appoints Campanella as Historian-in-Residence Thomas J. Campanella, associate professor of city and regional planning and director of undergraduate studies, has been appointed Historian-in-Residence of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation

by Commissioner Mitchell J. Silver.

In this volunteer capacity he will conduct independent research on the development of the city’s parks, and assist Jonathan Kuhn, director of art and antiquities, with strategic research projects related to parklands history. Campanella will also help lead a major effort to research, write, and update brief narratives on the design history and cultural significance of several hundred parks, playgrounds, and natural areas in New York City. These will be used for both on-site historical markers as well as the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation website, and will eventually be compiled into an official publication titled A Field Guide to the Parklands of New York City, coedited by Kuhn and Campanella. Campanella will be aided by a team of graduate and undergraduate students who will assist with archival research and drafting of the narratives.AAP

Missouri Theater in St. Joseph, Missouri. photo / Jennifer Minner

CRP’s Minner Is Guest Editor of JAPA Special Issue on Historic Preservation Assistant professor in CRP Jennifer Minner was a guest editor for a special issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA) on historic preservation and planning. The issue was published in March, marking the 50th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, and presented the latest research on historic preservation and its relationship to city and regional planning.

Minner coedited the special issue (vol. 82, no. 2) with Michael Holleran, an associate professor and director of the graduate program in historic preservation at the University of Texas–Austin School of Architecture. The issue included Minner’s article, “Revealing Synergies, Tensions, and Silences Between Preservation and Planning.”

“Historic preservation and planning often operate together in the United States within local planning departments,” Minner writes, with both shared concerns and areas of conflict. She concludes, “Both planners and preservationists can benefit from stronger alliances in which scholars and practitioners engage in deeper dialogues and exchange. This interdisciplinary collaboration can unite leadership and vision with regard to equity and social justice, with deeper place-based knowledge to improve the social, environmental, and economic health of communities.”

In April, she presented on the special issue at the American Planning Association conference held in Phoenix, Arizona.AAP

Faculty & Staff Notes Associate professor in architecture Esra Akcan received the 2016 –17 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, where she will be a fellow in the fall of 2016. Her curatorial project, ArchitectuREfugee, was a finalist for the Turkish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale of 2016. In May, Akcan gave the keynote lecture at the “Urban and Architectural Translations in Modern Asia” symposium at the University of Hong Kong.

She also lectured and presented papers at the Graham Foundation, University of Michigan, Smith College, and Columbia University. Her articles were published in Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Arradamento Mimarlik, and Dolmabahçe: Mekânın Hafızası.

In April, she organized and moderated the panel “Toward an Intertwined History of Architecture Around the Globe: The Survey and the Textbook,” featuring Kenneth Frampton and Kathleen James-Chakraborty and sponsored by the Luigi Einaudi Center for European

Studies at Cornell University.

She also co-organized the panel “Modern Architectures in Africa” in April, with a Central New York Humanities Corridor Grant.

New and ongoing work by Michael Ashkin, associate professor and chair in the Department of Art, were shown in solo exhibitions at Cathouse FUNeral and Cathouse Proper in Brooklyn, in March and April. The dual gallery shows were coordinated by alumnus David Dixon (M.F.A. ’10), who directs both spaces. Additionally, Ashkin received a MacDowell Colony Residency Fellowship— his fourth since 2011—to continue works in progress during the summer.

Two essays by CRP’s associate professor and director of undergraduate studies, Thomas J. Campanella, will be included in Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (University of California Press, 2016)—the third and final book in a series of atlases by writer and activist

Rebecca Solnit and Josh JellySchapiro that “excavate” the built environment. In addition to the book, Campanella recently collaborated with Frank Parish, director of AAP facilities; and Andre Hafner, director of AAP IT Solutions, to create an Augmented Reality Sandbox (ARS) for teaching and demonstration purposes. The ARS projects real-time topographic contour lines and color-coded elevation data onto sand “terrain,” using an LCD projector and 3D scanner driven by software developed at the University of California–Davis.

In February, visiting assistant professor in architecture Iñaqui Carnicero presented a lecture at the 11th National Convention of the Institute of Indian Interior Designers in Indore, India. The lecture was focused on Rome as a precedent of how a city may be built and destroyed over time while reusing almost the same raw materials. Conceptually similar was Unfinished, an event held in March at Storefront for

the Arts in New York City, cocurated by Carnicero, with visiting assistant professor in architecture Lorena del Río joining the design team.

CRP’s Assistant Professor Suzanne Lanyi Charles and professors John Forester and Mildred Warner received Cornell Institute for Social Sciences (ISS) small grants in April. Charles’s research project, Housing Redevelopment and the Evolution of Suburban Immigrant Communities, looks at the demolition and rebuilding of suburban single-family housing to create homes that better match households’ needs, transforming the social, economic, and physical landscape of older postwar American suburbs. Forester shares the award with professors Paul Sawyer in English and Aaron Sachs in history, for an interdisciplinary conference they are creating and hosting in May 2017 titled, “Creative Academic Writing: Exploring the Relationship Between Artful Prose and

Scholarly Production.” Warner’s grant was for “Understanding the Impact of Austerity on New York’s Local Governments,” a study by the fall 2015 CRP 5074 Economic and Community Development Workshop and Yunji Kim (Ph.D. CRP ’17).

The study investigates how local governments in New York state face fiscal stress due to economic and demographic factors, and shifts in state policy, since the Great Recession. In addition to the ISS grant, Warner and Travis North (M.R.P./M.L.A. ’14) received a grant funded by Engaged Cornell for work on child- and age-friendly communities. The grant places three sophomore URS students— Andrew Canfield (B.S. URS ’18), Erin Tou (B.S. URS ’18), and Rachel Stein (B.S. URS ’18)— in a summer internship with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Sullivan County, New York, which has a diverse population and high poverty. The students will work on an analysis of how a rural community can become more age friendly.

The Downtown Ithaca Alliance selected artwork submitted

by AAP Communications staff member Sheri D’Elia for Art in the Heart/Art in the Air, a seasonal banner program on the recently renovated Ithaca Commons pedestrian mall. Printed on vinyl banners, D’Elia’s painting and work by other artists will be displayed on lampposts through November, and then auctioned off to support future public art programs in Ithaca.

Associate professor in architecture, Jeremy Foster, published articles “Archaeology, aviation and the topographical projection of paradoxical modernism in 1940s South Africa,” in Architectural Research Quarterly 19:2 (2015):133–148; and “Mining, Modernity & Morality: Joane Pim and the Practice(s) of Landscape Culture in Mid 20th C. South Africa,” in Women, Modernity, and Landscape Architecture, editors S. Dümpelmann and J. Beardsley (Routledge, 2015): 122–144. Additionally, Foster gave a paper in April at the

2016 Society of Architectural Historians Annual International Conference in Pasadena, titled “Carboniferous Hauntings: Elaborating Time-Consciousness at Emscher Park IBA.” In recognition of his 25 years in planning for agriculture and agricultural land protection in New York state, CRP Visiting Lecturer George R. Frantz was appointed to a four-year term on the Tompkins County Agriculture and Farmland Protection Board.

In June, Frantz was a visiting academic at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he completed a study of agricultural land policies and agritourism development in Shanghai and New York state, and conducted field investigations on storm water infrastructure design and flood resilience; he also presented a lecture on the Garden Cities movement in urban planning in New York and Shanghai at Xi’an Jiao Tong University.

Visiting associate professor in art, Bill Gaskins, authored

Venice Biennale Winner

photo / Fernando Maquieira

Visiting assistant professor in architecture Iñaqui Carnicero and cocurator Carlos Quintáns were given the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale at an award ceremony held in May. The Golden Lion was awarded to the Spanish Pavilion exhibition Unfinished, which seeks to direct attention to processes more than results in an attempt to discover design strategies generated by an optimistic view of the constructed environment after economic crisis. AAP students and alumni who assisted Carnicero and Visiting Assistant Professor Lorena del Río with Unfinished were Johanna Grazel (B.Arch. ’15), Mikhail Grinwald (B.Arch. ’13), Steven Song Ren (B.Arch. ’19), and Elena Toumayan (B.Arch. ’15).AAP

Morris and Woods Receive Graham Foundation Grants Professor Mary N. Woods and Associate Professor of Practice Mark Morris are among the recipients of new grants from the Chicago-based Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, which supports “innovative projects engaging original ideas in architecture.”

The Graham Foundation this year awarded more than $490,000 in new grants to support 59 projects undertaken by individuals and collaborative teams of architects, designers, curators, filmmakers, visual artists, musicians, and writers representing 42 countries.

Woods’s grant is in support of her forthcoming book, Women Architects in India: Histories of Practice in Mumbai and Delhi (Routledge, 2016). Woods also received grants from the AAP Dean’s Fund and Cornell’s South Asia Program for this publication.

Morris’s research for a planned book, Ron Herron: Archigram and After, focuses on the untapped archive of the creator of “Walking City” and other seminal projects from the groundbreaking British architectural group.AAP

At left: Women headloaders at a construction site in Hyderabad, India, are part of Woods’s research for her forthcoming book. photo / Mary N. Woods At right: Ron Herron’s Manzak, Proposal for a Personal Architecture (1969), mixed media collage.

Bill Staffeld Exhibition Upstate ’70s: The Soul of a Documentary Photographer, an exhibition by AAP college photographer Bill Staffeld, featured images originally taken in the 1970s in towns and cities across Upstate New York. The images document what was once a rich and dense urban landscape that was quickly becoming postindustrial. “By the late 1970s, at night, and even during daylight, only the shadows of former things and beings remained in a spirit world that was revealed in the moment I unwound the film from the reel,” says Staffeld in describing the photos. The exhibition was on display in John Hartell Gallery from January 25 to February 19.AAP

the inaugural contribution to SPEakOp, a new online editorial platform from the Society for Photographic Education. In his submission, This Is Not the Future, Gaskins examines the need for a sustainable and relevant academic conference model. Gaskins was also the recipient of the 2015 –16 Melinda G. Watts ’03 Prize for Undergraduate Faculty Excellence.

In May, professor emeritus in CRP Bill Goldsmith attended the Left Forum conference held at John Jay College for Criminal and Social Justice of The City University of New York. Goldsmith sat on a panel, “Expanding the Fightback Against Neoliberalism,” that considered proposals for expanding the pushback against neoliberalism internationally, in U.S. cities, and from the perspectives of gender, race, and class.

Austin + Mergold LLC’s proposal was a finalist in stage two of the invitational competition for the new Terekhovo metro station

in Moscow. In their proposal, principals Assistant Professor Aleksandr Mergold (B.Arch. ’00) and Jason Austin (B.Arch. ’00) addressed the question of how to create a uniquely local, contemporary, and meaningful experience in the station within the budget and a strict material palette. The proposal examined the properties of the tactile studded resilient tile demarcating the platform edges, and the iconic “safety” yellow, orange, and red colors associated with subways across the globe.

Mark Morris’s entry, Ink-Soaked Boy, was among 10 honorable mentions in Blank Space’s third annual fairy tale competition, a project focused on linking architectural narratives to images. Ink-Soaked Boy is a collaboration of Morris and the illustrator, Professor Neil Spiller, Hawksmoor Chair of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Greenwich. Morris was also recently named Professor of Practice, a five-year appointment for non-tenure-track faculty

at Cornell who are distinguished and highly experienced individuals in a relevant field of professional practice, and who can provide effective, practiceoriented instruction in areas that supplement the core pedagogical instruction provided by the tenured and tenure-track faculty.

Professor of architecture Jonathan Ochshorn was accepted as a Fulbright Scholar in China, from September 2016 through January 2017.

Ochshorn will teach within a professional architecture program at Tianjin University in Tianjin, a port city near Beijing, focusing on sustainability and building technology, areas of architectural research that he has studied in the context of U.S. practice and teaching at Cornell.

Previously, Ochshorn was a Fulbright Senior Specialist in 2001.

Carl Ostendarp, associate professor of art and director of the M.F.A. program, was selected as a resident faculty artist at the acclaimed Skowhegan School of

Painting and Sculpture for the summer of 2016. One of five resident faculty artists selected for the 2016 program, Ostendarp lived on campus for the entire session, lectured on his work, met individually with each participant during the session, and worked alongside participants in their own studios.

Ostendarp was also recently quoted in an article in Observer Culture, titled “Are Painters Out of Ideas?,” that examined the growing phenomenon of young artists mimicking 20th-century masters. In addition, he had work included in an exhibit of M.F.A. alumni at the Yale University School of Art’s 32 Edgewood Gallery.

In May, Stephanie Owens, visiting assistant professor of art and director of Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA), participated in a public panel with internationally renowned artist Kimsooja at The Cooper Union in New York City. The topic was Kimsooja’s CCA project—the 46-foot-tall structure A Needle

Woman: Galaxy Was a Memory, Earth Is a Souvenir (2014)— and the corresponding ART21 documentary, Collaboration on Campus—Nanotechnology & Contemporary Art.

towns in southwestern France, known as bastides. In addition, Reps’s groundbreaking book, The Making of Urban America, which is still in print, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

In February, work by associate professor of art, Maria Park, was included in the group exhibition Fifty Shades of Red, at the Herter Gallery, University of Massachusetts, in Amherst, Massachusetts, in which the color red plays a dominant role in the creation of the finished image. Additionally, the San Francisco Arts Commission acquired Park’s work for a permanent collection in the new wing at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.

The April issue of Artforum featured 2THNDNL, an exhibition at the Michael Benevento gallery in Los Angeles of work

by David Snyder, visiting critic in art. Snyder’s show was also reviewed in Artagenda and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (CARLA).

Glorious Bastides: A Journey Through Time, an exhibition of photographs by Professor Emeritus John Reps, was shown in the Bibliowicz Family Gallery this past spring. Taken in 1966, the photos recorded the appearance of some of the most important 13th-century planned

Gordon Matta-Clark’s photographs and films of urban ruin and renewal at “Picturing Policy,” a conference organized by the University of Pennsylvania’s Historic Preservation program.

With support from the Clarence Stein Institute, she and New Delhi filmmaker Vani Subramanian interviewed and filmed at cinemas in Mumbai, Calicut, and the New York City area for a documentary on Indian cinema halls as architectures of migration and immigration.

Sculptor and Professor Emeritus of Art Jack Squier (M.F.A. ’52), who mentored and inspired students over five decades of teaching and left a lasting legacy of public sculpture on campus, died December 31 at his home in Florida. He was 88.

This spring, architecture professor Mary N. Woods was the keynote speaker for the Institute of Indian Interior Designers’ fourth annual conference, held in Bhopal, India. She also gave a paper on

News20 | Fall 2016

19

Alumni

Profile

Investing in Communities Among the many solutions proposed to address economic disparity and hardship, none may have a more positive impact than community development investment—providing money for initiatives and institutions that can breathe new life into cities, towns, and villages by providing opportunities for the people who need them most.

It’s a plan of action embraced by Ronald Kelly (M.R.P. ’08), who currently serves as director of impact strategy for Capital Impact Partners, a national community development financial institution based in Arlington, Virginia. As someone responsible for evaluating the organization’s impacts on its clients, he has seen the difference an infusion of capital can have on populations struggling to keep their heads above water.

“The need for community development finance is truly great. While the United States is largely blessed with economic prosperity, it is not uniform,” Kelly says. “Far too many communities get left behind, both urban and rural. Community development finance can step in to make investments that have long-term positive influences—by improving educational opportunities for young people, increasing access to health care and healthy foods, and catalyzing asset-building through small business development or worker ownership.”

This is the spirit of the lending work done by Capital Impact, he says. “I am thrilled to be on the team that helps to develop the strategy of the overall organization, and to do what it is that drove me to graduate school to study city and regional planning in the first place, by helping us improve the ways in which we measure and track our collective impact.”

A mission-driven lender, Capital Impact has deployed more than $2 billion into low-income communities to help build and expand community health centers, charter schools, healthy food enterprises, mixed-use real estate projects that support affordable housing, and cooperatives, among other ventures. This effort supports Capital Impact’s work to help create a nation of communities built on equity, opportunity, and inclusiveness.

Kelly’s interest in lending and economic development began on a much smaller scale. He was an

undergraduate business student at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) who “cared about more than the bottom line for companies,” and also had an interest in how businesses can positively impact the communities in which they operate, he says.

As an undergrad he helped start a credit union in his hometown, Jamestown, New York. The goal was to provide small consumer loans to a Puerto Rican population that was being exploited by rent-to-own agencies, and faced both an equity challenge and a language barrier.

“Church leaders in the community saw that the local Puerto Rican population was relying on rent-toown agencies for many of their purchases, and were being taken advantage of. We wanted to create a way for them to get small loans, which is what credit unions specialize in,” Kelly explains.

A credit union was established, open to anyone who lived, worked, or worshiped in Jamestown, and it was housed in a community center run by the Joint Neighborhood Council, a place familiar to the target population. The church leaders pledged deposits as seed money and, after the neighborhood institution was chartered and operated with volunteers for a couple years, a more established local credit union saw the market potential of serving the same customers and acquired it in a merger.

“It was a great success,” Kelly says. “We were able to show that the people we served were good customers, and then find a way for them to have better access to financial services than what we could cobble together through our volunteer network.”

After graduating from RIT, and buoyed by that positive experience, Kelly joined ShoreBank in Chicago, which was then the first and largest community development bank in the U.S. From there, he attended graduate school at Cornell, to study city and regional planning. “My primary goal was to add to my skill set— particularly to learn how to analyze communities to

understand what sort of impacts these types of investments were spurring,” he says.

His graduate studies in the city planning program did, indeed, provide the skills he sought, Kelly says.

“I definitely had a better sense of what made cities and regions tick; how their economies worked, what progressive policies would better work along with community development finance in tandem, and how to conduct both quantitative and qualitative research to ascertain the impacts of various policy interventions,” he says.

Kelly recalls that he took every course that Professor Susan Christopherson offered during his two years at Cornell, “and I would continue to take economic development planning courses with her as long as she could stand me being there. I learned such a great deal from her and was thrilled to have her as my thesis advisor.”

He also enrolled in several classes with Professor Pierre Clavel, now emeritus, who served as the second on his committee. “Pierre gave me a better perspective on planning history—learning how past trials and errors can be used to better communities going forward,” Kelly says. “And, one of the classes that I think about quite often was a core course taught by [Professor] John Forester that really drove home the point that so much of the work we do as practitioners is in the gray area of policy. If there were black-andwhite, cookie-cutter answers for our work then we wouldn’t continue to see the problems of poverty, disinvestment, etcetera. One of the best lessons from my time at Cornell was to be comfortable with the gray area.”

Kelly finished his master’s degree at the height of the Great Recession, which delivered a severe blow to community development financial institutions.

He then spent seven years with a nonprofit that focused primarily on work at the federal, state, and regional levels involving economic and workforce development issues.

He went on to lead workforce and economic development strategy for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Sustainable Communities Initiatives in the Erie, Pennsylvania, and Knoxville, Tennessee, regions and led research projects for the Arizona Commerce Authority, including an assessment of the state’s green economy and an evaluation of the economic diversity of the state’s aerospace and defense industry.

“It was a wonderful experience to work directly with communities to help them shape their own economic future,” says Kelly. “The work often started with an assessment of current conditions. This was important because community leaders can have misperceptions about the strengths and weaknesses of their economy or workforce. Starting from a common understanding of what’s happening on the ground is important.

And, sometimes we had to do a great deal of research to get to that common understanding. An example of that is the survey I managed that went out to 10,000 businesses to provide the baseline assessment of the green economy for the State of Arizona.”

Before joining Capital Impact, Kelly led a team of experts in banking, commercial lending, and economic development policy to analyze the lending programs offered through the U.S. Treasury Department’s State Small Business Credit Initiative. This involved some 150 lending programs run by state agencies around the country with small business investment programs totaling more than $1 billion.

There is much satisfaction in doing work that results in broad-based benefits, Kelly says. “It’s a really great feeling to be able to come to work every day knowing that my organization positively impacts the lives of so many individuals. And, that we’re not just sitting back on our laurels celebrating what we’ve done—that we’re continuing to strive to do more and find new ways to create positive change.

It’s very motivating,” he says.

Still, there are substantial challenges. “We are trying to improve economic conditions in areas that have long been underserved. The factors that led to their current conditions are so multifaceted and often very entrenched,” he says. “Those factors include housing, jobs, education—they must be addressed simultaneously, which is difficult, because they are all interrelated. There are no silver bullet solutions.”AAPJay Wrolstad

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From Iran with Love In November 2015, Nicolas Martin (B.Arch. â&#x20AC;&#x2122;12) traveled to Iran with funding from the Robert James Eidlitz Fellowship to study the virtues of Persian architecture. Over the course of three weeks he meandered from Tehran to Shiraz, exploring the story of Iranâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s architecture (from 5000 BC to present), and how these sacred masterpieces are inhabited today. The resulting exhibition, From Iran with Love, on display at AAP NYC in March, revealed a side of Iran that is less accessible in the media today. Persian friends, made during the journey, brought the images to life through captioned stories. Martin is currently a designer at Plan A, an architecture and design firm based in New York City.

Handel Architects Designs World’s Tallest Passive House at Cornell Tech Campus

Alumni

In 2011, Cornell University and partner the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology won New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s highly publicized competition to build a new, 12-acre applied science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island. The new Cornell Tech campus is an innovative project in mission, architecture, and planning, with the world’s tallest passive house building at its center.

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Handel Architects, the firm of Gary Handel (B.Arch. ’78) and partner Blake Middleton (B.Arch. ’78, M.Arch. ’81), designed the 26-story residential tower that is now under construction. It will be the first residential high-rise in the world to meet the “passive house” code—the strict international building standards that drastically reduce energy consumption while creating a healthier and more comfortable living environment for a fraction of typical energy costs.

Handel and Middleton presented project details at the annual L. Michael Goldsmith Lecture at AAP NYC in April. The tower, a 270,000-square-foot area of 325 units, 500 beds, and 10,600 square feet per floor, has a core “big idea”—a thermal wrap for the entire building that is 10 times tighter than a standard building.

Meeting all of the passive house code requirements and compliancy was new to the entire design/build team and a challenge, the architects admitted. For example, ducted fresh air and a heat recovery system are necessary, with proper solar orientation. A refrigerant flow system supplies tiny bursts of heating and cooling to terminal units located in the individual rooms, and the architects are working with HVAC manufacturers on another innovation—to dramatically reduce the size of these units to fit the plan. Seventyseven percent of heat that is exhausted to the roof is recovered, and the ducted fresh air is sent through a series of HEPA filters, so the quality is essentially better than what comes in through the windows.

Prefabricated panels that are story-height and 14" to 16" thick will clad the entire building, complete with windows, sheathing, and insulation, creating an impermeable vapor barrier. Facing Manhattan, the exterior facade opens to reveal a louver system that extends the entire height of the building, providing an enclosed exterior space where the heating and cooling equipment live, allowing the building system to breathe. Sealing and joining windows and panels ensure that the building meets passive house standards, as spot checks and field tests of the mock-up are conducted along the way.

The project is a joint venture partnership between the Hudson Companies, the Related Companies, and Cornell University. Says Handel, “We are proud of Cornell for undertaking this and pleased with our role in the project.”

“I think what’s really unique about this building and what we’re able to do in terms of achieving change is to act as an example in New York City, in development, and as an institution,” says Jennifer Klein, assistant director for strategic capital partnerships at Cornell Tech. “This building will shine as an example for future development, of how Cornell Tech wants to act in the larger economy in New York and other urban areas.”

As he announced the building’s opening in August 2017, Middleton joked, “I’m still trying to figure out how to get the chimes from McGraw Tower on top.”AAP 1

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A recent photo of the construction on Roosevelt Island shows the Passive House on the left. photo / Barr & Barr

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From left: Blake Middleton (B.Arch. ’78, M.Arch. ’81) and Gary Handel (B.Arch. ’78) lectured at AAP NYC in April. photo / Zachary Tyler Newtown (M.Arch. ’10)

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Prefabricated panels are installed on the Passive House this spring. photo / Field Conditions

photo / LMN

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photos / provided

AIA’s Highest Award Given to Architecture Alum’s Firm

LMN, the firm of Rafael Viñoly-Menendez (B.Arch. ’89), received the American Institute of Architects 2016 Architecture Firm Award, the highest honor the AIA bestows on an architecture firm. The award recognizes one architectural practice every year for sustained design excellence and extraordinary contributions to the profession as well as to broader society. Founded in 1979, LMN has dedicated its practice to the health and vitality of communities of all scales, and is known for enriching civic design in the public and private realms.

“The AIA Firm Award is especially meaningful to us because it transcends individual project accomplishments, recognizing the entire firm, its people, culture, social engagement, and contributions to the profession,” says ViñolyMenendez, who has been a partner at LMN since 1999. “LMN was founded on the premise that our people are the core of everything we do, and for more than 37 years we have worked really hard at building and maintaining a culture that engages all of us in a collaborative enterprise. For us, collaboration is not only fundamental to generating unique discoveries and producing work that is reflective of a shared vision among architect partners, consultants, user groups, and clients, it’s how we are able to have fun while working on really cool projects.”AAP

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photo / Hou de Sousa

Sticks Wins Folly 2016 Sticks, the project of architects Josh de Sousa (B.Arch. ’04) and Nancy Hou (B.Arch. ’04) of Hou de Sousa, was the winner of the annual Folly architecture competition of Socrates Sculpture Park and the Architectural League of New York. The theme of this year’s competition was function, and entrants were asked to address practical issues regarding the park’s existing facilities, as well as community and educational programs hosted throughout the year. In accordance with the sustainable mission of Socrates Sculpture Park, throughout May and June the architects were in the park building Sticks in full view of the public, using preexisting park resources, such as scrap materials stored on site, in the structural grid of the walls and roof.

The 18-inch thickness of the structural exoskeleton acts as shelving capable of storing sculptural works in progress or serving as a display case for curated events, in addition to providing a sheltered space and providing a hub for the park’s Education Studio. Sticks opened at Socrates Sculpture Park in July.

M.F.A. Alumna Sam Jury’s Work Documents Lives of Saharan Refugees In May, an exhibit of Sam Jury’s (M.F.A. ’98) recent work was installed at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (Broad MSU) in East Lansing, Michigan.

To Be Here developed from Jury’s time spent with exiled Sahrawi refugees in the Western Sahara near Tindouf, Algeria. During a two-week residency, Jury used hand-held cameras to document the daily lives of people in the extreme conditions of the camps. Jury deconstructed her original linear form of the film to create the multichannel video and sound installation at the Broad MSU. A number of major group exhibitions at the Broad MSU have featured Jury’s work. In July, she was part of an exhibition at CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, China, organized by the Broad MSU and CAFA, titled Moving Time: Video Art at 50.

Jury’s work is in the permanent collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, where the video installation Forever Is Never was shown in 2010.

Her Cornell M.F.A. in painting was followed by a two-year fellowship in print and digital media at the Royal Academy Schools–London. She is a Perlmutter Award–winning artist represented by Stephen Haller Gallery in New York City.AAP

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Architecture Alumnus Joseph Kennedy Receives Fulbright Award In May, Joseph Kennedy (B.Arch. ’15) received a Fulbright U.S. Student Award to conduct research or teach abroad in 2016 –17.

Kennedy will use the award to travel to Norway to work on a study of traditional Norwegian nomadic structures for his project, titled Trailer Trash: Affordable Nomadic Prototypes. Using the facilities and resources at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Kennedy says he plans to build a full-scale prototype of an affordable mobile home.

“The project is titled Trailer Trash because I intend to use recycled and easily accessible materials to manufacture spatially efficient alternatives to cheap mobile homes and refugee camps,” Kennedy says.

“My interest in temporary nomadic structures began as a theme in many of the art installations I designed and constructed with friends while a student at Cornell, in particular one that involved a wooden

structure transported by U-Haul throughout the Cornell campus over the course of an entire day.”

Kennedy continues to collaborate with other AAP alumni. In addition to the Fulbright Award, he and former classmate Caio Barboza (B.Arch. ’13) received a first-round selection in the Taipei World Design Capital competition for a retrofit of a garbage truck for mobile exhibitions and events. Another AAP connection he maintains is with Arthur Huang (B.Arch. ’01).

“Since graduating from Cornell, I have been working for MINIWIZ, a Taiwanese company founded

by Arthur that uses recycled material to develop materials incorporated into buildings and consumer products,” says Kennedy. Huang is the architect who designed Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Assistant Professor Jenny Sabin’s textile pavilion for Nike in Shanghai.AAP

Documentary by Art Alumnus Is Screened at SXSW A feature documentary film by Brett A. Schwartz (B.A./B.F.A ’95) had its world premiere at SXSW in March, where it received a Spotlight Documentary Film Award.

Insatiable: The Homaro Cantu Story follows the career of Chicago chef and inventor Homaro Cantu. In addition to the SXSW honors, Insatiable won an Award of Recognition from the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards.

Based in Chicago, Schwartz’s work has been screened at SXSW, Slamdance, and Cinequest, and aired on Bravo, MSNBC, HGTV, Court TV, CBS, and PBS, among other places. Schwartz heads his documentary production company, StoryScreen, and teaches television production, journalism, and history at Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Illinois. In addition to his Cornell degrees, Schwartz holds an M.A. in documentary film and video production from Stanford University, and an M.A. in social studies education from New York University.AAP News20 | Fall 2016

Dragon Day This year’s parade, which took place on March 25, featured an iridescent, jeweltoned beast that was mounted on an old vehicle chassis and pulled by a team of students, manifesting the theme of “rebirth.” Connected by pulleys, the articulated neck and head were operated by a crew working inside, visible through the loose covering of geometric shapes.

The head and neck—with movable eyes and mouth—reared into the sky above the heads of the crowd as the parade made its way from Rand Hall to the Arts Quad where second- through fifth-year architecture students shared in the postparade festivities. In a first this year, the parade was broadcast on Livestream, with commentary from AAP staff photographer, William Staffeld.

Jason Koski / Cornell Marketing Group

News20 | Fall 2016

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