Cornell AAP College Magazine: Spring 2019 by Cornell AAP

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

Non-Profit Org. US Postage PAID Syracuse NY Permit No 999

ARCHITECTURE ART PLANNING SPRING 2019

In High Demand 06 Brooklyn Cruise Terminal 17 An Undeniable Voice 37 Freespace 41

Cornell Art Faculty 2019 Faculty and visitors in Cornell’s Department of Art are invited to exhibit work at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art every few years, providing an opportunity for both the university community and the broader public to reflect on the relationship between education and practice.

Yuzhen (Adam) Zhang (B.Arch. ’21) working on his project for the second-year undergraduate architecture studio Design IV: Music Device, taught by Visiting Professor Rubén Alcolea and Visiting Critic João Almeida.

Artists with work in the spring semester show included Michael Ashkin, Roberto Bertoia, Leslie Brack, Robin Cameron, Christine Elfman, Renate Ferro, Gail Fitzgerald, Bill Gaskins, Branden Hookway, Anna Huff in collaboration with Nancy Lee Kelly, Joanna Malinowska, Elisabeth H. Meyer, Chris Oliver, Carl Ostendarp, Gregory Page, Maria Park, Barry Perlus, Jolene K. Rickard, Stan Taft, Dan Torop, and Jaret Vadera.

Take a virtual tour aap.cornell.edu/ art-faculty-johnsonmuseum

Spring Spring 2019 2019

From the Dean The disciplines at Cornell AAP are about acts of transformation. We think and act creatively, critically, and constructively to imagine, plan, and build better futures. From design that tests new possibilities, to art that prompts new questions, to research that expands understanding and enables innovation, the roles and responsibilities that our community embraces both at Cornell and beyond are compelling and impactful. During the last few months, I have been inspired by our students, our faculty, and our alumni through many conversations. Their aspirations for positive impact on the built environment, expansion of the cultural imagination, and commitment to social ideals are palpable. This humanist perspective, disciplinary expertise, and interdisciplinary breadth has made AAP a place of distinction since its founding, and, collectively, we are committed to furthering its distinction and expanding its presence in the world. A significant physical transformation is taking place on our Ithaca campus, as the Mui Ho Fine Arts Library and state-of-the-art fabrication facility in Rand Hall are set for completion this summer. Beginning in August, students will have the much-needed spaces to advance their inquiries, studies, and creative work. The fall magazine will include in-depth coverage of the opening; for now, visit aap.cornell.edu/rand-mui-ho-fal-updates for construction updates and photos. The pages ahead have also undergone a transformation, inspired by your input. This new physically smaller biannual publication reflects the valuable work our students, faculty, and alumni are doing in the field, the studio, the classroom, and in our communities. In addition to the latest goings-on in Ithaca, New York City, and Rome, you will find feature stories on timely topics including housing and community development; monuments and dimensions of citizenship; design innovation and sustainability; and urban resilience and revitalization. We welcome your continued input and engagement as we work together to look ahead and take on new challenges.

FEATURES

In High Demand 06 Housing Innovation from the Studio to the Global City

Teaching Creative and Critical Practice 12 Visiting and Retiring Faculty

Freespace 41 Faculty, Students, and Alumni Participate in the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture

BRIEFS

Artists in Rome 16 Brooklyn Cruise Terminal 17 An Undeniable Voice 37 SECTIONS

In Review 02 Voices Amy Degen (M.R.P. ’85) 11 Caroline O’Donnell 15 Emery Bergmann (B.F.A. ’21) 50

From the Departments Architecture 18 Art 24 Planning 30

Alumni Projects 36 In The News 44 COVER Kelsey Burgers (B.A./B.F.A. ’19) prepares a canvas with gesso in the B.F.A. thesis studio in Olive Tjaden Hall.

Cornell AAP 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 CornellUniversity AAP is published twice yearly by the Cornell College of Architecture, Planning at 129 Sibley Dome, Ithaca,Art, NYand 14853-6701 Cornell University, through the Office of the Dean. (607) 254-6292

Warmly,

J. Meejin Yoon Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of Architecture, Art, and Planning

aapcommunications@cornell.edu College of Architecture, Art, and Planning aap.cornell.edu Cornell University 129 Sibley    Dome, Ithaca, NY 14853-6701 (607) 254-6292 aapcommunications@cornell.edu EDITORS Rebecca Bowes, Elise Gold aap.cornell.edu EDITORIAL COORDINATOR Patti Witten     CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Yasmeen Abedifard, Emery Bergmann, Rebecca Bowes, Amy Degen, EDITORS Rebecca Elise Rafson, Gold Renate Ferro, Edith Bowes, Fikes, Sarah Patti Witten,COORDINATOR Jay Wrolstad Patti Witten EDITORIAL COPY EDITOR Laura GlennEmery Bergmann, CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Rebecca Bowes, Design Amy Degen, Renate Ferro, Edith DESIGN KUDOS Collaboratory Fikes, Sarah Rafson, Patti Witten, Jay Wrolstad PHOTOGRAPHY William Staffeld (unless COPY EDITOR Laura Glenn otherwise noted) DESIGN KUDOS Design Collaboratory DISTRIBUTION COORDINATOR Sheri D’Elia

Tell us what you think Please take five minutes to share your thoughts on the new magazine! aap.cornell.edu/magazine-survey

PHOTOGRAPHY William Staffeld (unless

Printed on Torraspapel Creator Silk, Forestry DISTRIBUTION COORDINATOR Sheria D’Elia Stewardship Council stock. Printed by Brodock © May Utica, 2019 Cornell University Press, New York. Brodock Press is a member of the Forest Stewardship Council and the EPA’s Printed on Torraspapel Creator Silk, a Forestry Green Suppliers Network. 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.

Cornell AAP

In Review Visit aap.cornell.edu/news for full articles, and to subscribe to the monthly e-newsletter that shares all the latest AAP news.

New AAP Dean Sees Opportunities for Collaboration JAN 25

The Chronicle sat down with J. Meejin Yoon (B.Arch. ’95) in her Sibley Dome office in January to discuss opportunities and challenges for the college and its students and faculty; the evolution of AAP facilities since she was a student; and how architecture, planning, and artistic practice engage in critical issues of today.

Architecture and Art Alumni Complete New Casapoli Residency

JAN 20

Two recent graduates engaged Casa Poli and the surrounding site, staying for one month as inaugural AAP artists-in-residence at the house in Chile.

Cornell Symposium Looks at Architecture and Construction Post-Waste

Chitra Ganesh Named Cornell University Teiger Mentor in the Arts

JAN 2

MAR 18

Titled “Wasted: Trash Talks,” the spring 2019 Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium gathered the world’s leading creative experts on waste and design to focus on the question of how they can play a larger and more creative role in design for a circular future.

Frantz Continues Fracking Work in the Classroom and in the Field

MAR 13

A fall class taught by George Frantz, associate professor of the practice in CRP, furthered his research on the fracking industry in Pennsylvania.

Student Team Receives 2019 ULI Hines Honorable Mention

Association Publishes Vol. 10

DEC 4

CRP Professor’s Research on Resilience Receives Funding

JAN 15

Cornell University’s David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future has awarded a $13,430 grant to Assistant Professor Linda Shi, CRP, in support of her study of the relationship between urban centers and rural hinterlands in efforts to promote urban resilience.

MAR 6

Student redesign of a site in Cincinnati, Ohio, was one of nine entries to receive an honorable mention in the annual ULI Hines Student Competition.

Kent Kleinman Named Provost at Rhode Island School of Design

DEC 20

Spring 2019 New Hires

Pezo and von Ellrichshausen Join Architecture Faculty as Professors of the Practice Mauricio Pezo and Sofía von Ellrichshausen have been hired in a shared three-year appointment as associate professors of the practice of architecture, beginning January 1, 2019.

FEB 19

DEC 3

Architecture Student’s River Sculpture Is a Hidden Gem

FXCollaborative and Höweler and Yoon Imagine the Future of Mobility at New Cooper Hewitt Exhibit

JAN 24

Dialoguing: Pen, Plate, and Artist JAN 18

Students, Faculty Shape Global Effort to Cool a Warming World DEC 18

Stormwater Management Park in Your Future? DEC 13

Architecture Studio’s Work Joins U.S.-Mexico Border Exhibition at Yale DEC 6

Cornell, Community Partners Help Drive Buffalo’s Revival DEC 4

Grants Help Graduate Students to Do Research around the World DEC 4

Advanced Printmaking Students Show Their Work at PRINTFEST 2018

NOV 30

Starling Receives Annual Hartell Award for Art NOV 29

Provost Research Innovation Award Winners Announced NOV 26

Discussion Explores Use of Social Impact Bonds NOV 19

Ithaca Community Contributes to the Global Conversation on Climate Change NOV 19

Solemma’s Architectural Design and Daylight Analysis Event Draws a Crowd NOV 5

The Making of a Young Artist NOV 2

Engaged Opportunity Grants Awarded to AAP Faculty and Students

Pezo and von Ellrichshausen are the principals of the art and architecture firm Pezo von Ellrichshausen, based in Concepción, Chile. In their practice, the pair sees architecture as a “coherent complex” having the potential to become a profound form of knowledge—an artificial device that promotes an intense experience of the world, a particular way of seeing it, and, eventually, “an extended understanding about something else.” They teach regularly in Chile, have taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and have been visiting professors at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as guest lecturers at Cornell AAP, the Tate Modern, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pezo and von Ellrichshausen curated the Chilean Pavilion at the 2008 Venice Biennale of Architecture, and their studio work has been honored with the Mies Crown Hall Americas Emerge Prize from the Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture; the Rice Design Alliance Prize; the Iberoamerican Architecture Biennial Award; and the Chilean Architecture Biennial Award, among other prizes. An extensive list of exhibitions includes a permanent collection at MoMA in New York City. Their built work often features monolithic towers and stacked or interlocking geometric volumes. Pezo completed a master’s in architecture at the Universidad Católica de Chile (Santiago, 1998) and a degree in architecture at the Universidad del Bío-Bío (Concepción, 1999). He was awarded the Young Architect Prize by the Chilean Architects Association in 2006, and the Municipal Art Prize by the Concepción City Hall in 2013. Von Ellrichshausen holds a degree in architecture from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, where she was distinguished with an honors diploma from the Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo. Their firm was established in 2002.

In Review

Cornell AAP

In the Field

India

Lisbon

Lakewood, Ohio

Third-year M.Arch. students in Core Design Studio V, taught by Associate Professor Lily Chi and Visiting Critic Sarosh Anklesaria, traveled to Ahmedabad, India, in September. The studio used the city as “a laboratory for challenging architecture’s capacity to affect, distort, change, and innovate; to produce hybrid and new typologies of resilience; and to generate new imaginations for this city of myriad contestations.” photo / Lily Chi

Manuel Aires Mateus, the fall 2018 Thomas J. Baird Visiting Critic, and Visiting Critic Rodolfo Reis Dias, led a studio titled To Inhabit on an eight-day intensive workshop in Lisbon that extended their exploration of the home.

Students in Visiting Critic Mitch Glass’s Land Use, Environmental Planning, and Urban Design Workshop took two trips to Lakewood, Ohio, where they partnered with city officials on urban design plans for the city.

Greenland Led by Strauch Visiting Critic in Sustainable Design Dorte Mandrup and Visiting Associate Professor Marianne Hansen, the studio titled Conditions: Architectural Interventions in the Arctic traveled to the town of Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. The students were tasked with conceiving environmentally sustainable, site-specific interventions that respond to the challenging realities of the Arctic. photo / Roberto Villasante (B.Arch. ’20)

Detroit Nothing Stops Detroit, a studio led by Gensler Visiting Critics Maria Claudia Clemente and Francesco Isidori, centered primarily around the students’ design of an “urban incubator” that addressed critical issues such as low density, low functionality, or low identity, all understood as models for scrutinizing alternative methods of urban regeneration. photo / Brandon Choy (B.Arch. ’19)

Cleveland Forty-five students in CRP took a three-day field trip to Cleveland in October to learn the inner workings of American urbanism firsthand. The trip was led by Assistant Professor Linda Shi and included M.R.P. and HPP students. photo / Audrey Wachs (M.R.P. ’20)

photo / Mitch Glass

New York City A group of students from the Department of Art displayed their work at PRINTFEST, a three-day annual print fair in New York City hosted by the International Print Center of New York. Students were accompanied to the fair by Associate Professor Greg Page and Julianne Hunter, AAP’s printmaking specialist.

Pittsburgh M.F.A. students traveled with Visiting Critic Linda Norden to Pittsburgh in November, where they toured the Carnegie Museum and met with Ingrid Shaffner, curator of the 2018 Carnegie International exhibition, and other museum staff. photo / Jenna Houston

Samia Henni, assistant professor of history of architecture and urban development in the Department of Architecture, curated the spring exhibition Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria. Based on French military propaganda during the Algerian Revolution (1954 – 62), or the Algerian War of Independence, the exhibition featured aspects of the evacuation of the Algerian rural population into settlement camps. Discreet Violence was held in John Hartell Gallery from March 7– April 11, 2019.

Cornell AAP

Throughout the 20th century and over the last two decades, we have seen an increasing number of architects and planners—as well as urban designers and theorists—study, propose, and effectively build cities in response to the need we all share for a place to live. Global conditions such as climate change and unprecedented urban population growth have underscored the urgency of research and design that responds to a consistently increasing demand for sustainable, innovative housing solutions. The resulting work in this area is at once exciting for its optimism and overwhelming, if justified, in its call for enormous shifts in both design priorities and human behaviors. Though we could extend the length of our view by several decades, a look at the work of AAP’s alumni, faculty, and students from the past year reveals an expanse of sites and contexts where architects and planners have demonstrated a strong commitment to innovative design for housing that is environmentally sustainable as well as responsive to sociopolitical, cultural, and economic conditions. From built projects in Harlem and Baltimore to studio and classroom investigations of locales from Ithaca and New York City to Chongqing, China, the AAP community is responding to the open question of the future of housing with plans and designs that are as conscientious as they are bold in their expression of our shared belief in the value of a high standard of living for all.

Housing Innovation from the Studio to the Global City

Spring 2019

Development without Displacement

Ernst Valery ’01 (B.S. URS ’00) is the founder and president of Baltimore-based Ernst Valery Investments (EVI). EVI, in partnership with the Baltimore Development Corporation, developed the Nelson Kohl project that was opened for occupancy in spring 2018. The Nelson Kohl adheres to current standards for environmentally sustainable design and construction; is located steps from Penn Station and other public transit; and stands out as a new multifamily, mixed-use building that adds amenities such as a library, a gallery, and a small café to Baltimore’s Station North Arts and Entertainment District. “For years, when I walked out of Penn Station and looked to the north there was a foreboding blank spot, an almost invisible barrier that inhibited me and others from moving to the north,” says Valery. “The Nelson Kohl will be a gateway to Station North welcoming all to this incredibly diverse neighborhood.” According to the press release, the project’s goal was also to shift the economic paradigm in Baltimore communities while adhering to a philosophy that resists the displacement of current residents as neighborhoods develop. “The 21st-century social justice movement is about economic development,” said Wendell Pierce, an investor in the project and cast member of HBO’s The Wire. “In the 20th century, we memorialized how you empower yourself and organize the community in changing laws and politics, understanding that laws can change behavior. The movement then understood that beliefs may not change but that by forcing behavior to change through legal means, we can move the needle. Now we have to add the second part of that equation to make sure that economic development comes into our communities because that is true empowerment.” The building houses 103 units in 90,000 square feet and is named after two of Valery’s mentors—Mary Nelson and Ben Kohl (Ph.D. CRP ’99)—who spent their lives dedicated to urban issues and helping people. “Many things excite me about this project, but one that may be less heralded but particularly heartwarming is the library that will be curated by Mary and Ben’s families,” said Valery. “I hope that the library will become a place for modern-day salons to take place and discuss the very real issues of urban planning and economic empowerment that are at the heart of so many of the challenges we face as a society today.”

Affordable Housing, Passive House Standards When complete, the Sendero Verde project in East Harlem will be the largest affordable housing project in the world to achieve Passive House standards. Led by Handel Architects, the firm of Gary Handel (B.Arch. ’78) and Blake Middleton (B.Arch. ’78, M.Arch. ’81), the project meets the standard with its integration of green space, a green roof, rainwater capture, high-quality insulation materials, and use of advanced solar energy technologies that cut resource consumption and energy costs by 70–90 percent.

The Nelson Kohl in Baltimore meets current standards for sustainable design and construction and adheres to a philosophy that resists the displacement of current residents as neighborhoods develop. photo / SSA/EVI

When complete, the Sendero Verde project in East Harlem by Handel Architects will be the largest affordable housing project in the world to achieve Passive House standards. photo / Handel Architects

In High Demand

Cornell AAP

“It matters what choices we make when we design buildings, especially choices that affect energy use and resiliency—significantly reducing the carbon footprint of buildings is no longer optional,” says Middleton. “We view each project we design as a catalyst for positive environmental and social change, both local and global. The Sendero Verde project exemplifies this approach. By creating affordable, sustainably designed housing, we can work to both break the cycle of poverty that disrupts so many people’s lives, and dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of large buildings of any type and use.” Plans for Sendero Verde began in 2016 with support from New York City’s SustainNYC program and community planning meetings that allowed for concerns such as affordable housing for current senior residents, the protection and enhancement of existing small businesses, and publicly accessible open space that meets the needs of community members now and in the future, to be addressed as first steps in research and development. The project is currently advancing through design and permitting phases, and features amenities such as community gardens, open space, a fresh food market, and an outdoor kitchen; as well as space for institutions that offer education, affordable housing, healthcare, and social services. Community partners prepared to occupy space at Sendero Verde include Union Settlement, a housing services provider established in 1895; Mount Sinai and the YMCA, who will collaborate to offer medically integrated health and fitness programs; and Harlem RBI/Dream Charter School, which has been operating in the neighborhood since 1991.

It matters what choices we make when we design buildings, especially choices that affect energy use and resiliency—significantly reducing the carbon footprint of buildings is no longer optional. —BLAKE MIDDLETON

2019 NYSERDA Buildings of Excellence Design Competition open for entries The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) launched a new Buildings of Excellence competition in March. Gale and Ira Drukier Dean J. Meejin Yoon is a member of the advisory council for the competition that will award up to $1 million to selected projects that demonstrate innovative design for low- to zero-carbon, affordable, multifamily housing. The initiative invites participation from architects whose work is replicable and demonstrates how low-carbon buildings can be profitable, comfortable, and attractive. More information about this competition and the funding available can be found at nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/Programs/Multifamily-Buildings-of-Excellence.

Assistant Professor Suzanne Lanyi Charles’s Residential and Commercial Development class is developing a plan for the former Immaculate Conception School in Ithaca.

Assistant professor Leslie Lok’s fall 2018 architecture option studio examined urban housing in Chongqing, China, on a combined field trip with the Mellon Collaborative Studies seminar.

LE A

RNIN

Residential and Commercial Development: Affordable Housing and Childcare in Ithaca, Assistant Professor Suzanne Lanyi Charles Charles’s spring 2019 commercial development class is creating a proposal in partnership with the Ithaca Child Development Council (ICDC) for a prototype of an affordable live-and-work residential project where residents can operate home-based childcare. “There is a dire need in Ithaca for both affordable housing and childcare,” says Charles. “Design alone can’t solve the affordable housing problem. An in-depth understanding of how affordable housing is financed is critical to increasing the availability of home-based childcare.” After taking a “deep dive” into real estate finance during the first half of the class, the seven M.R.P., six B.S. URS, and other students from outside AAP are developing a concept design for a physical prototype in tandem with a specific plan as to how the project will be financed. Charles says the project being developed this semester is innovative. “This type of low-income, live-work, home-based childcare project doesn’t yet exist in Ithaca. It’s exciting because if we can figure out how to make it work, it could have a really positive impact on our community.” The development proposal will be presented to the ICDC on the last day of class. In addition to ICDC, students are working with Ithaca Neighborhood Housing Services.

Spring 2019 More Innovative Housing Projects

Visiting Critic Sarosh Anklesaria’s spring 2019 seminar Architectures of Resistance and Empowerment in an Age of Late Capital hosted guest lecturer Karen Kubey, an urbanist specializing in housing and health and visiting associate professor at the Pratt Institute. For the fall Cornell in Rome third-year architecture studio Design V: Urban Pathways, Urban Connectors, and the River’s Edge, Alp Demiroglu (B.Arch. ’21) devoted one aspect of his project to public housing. Demiroglu proposed a public housing complex to replace an abandoned military base in Rome’s Flaminio District across from the MAXXI, connecting commercial and artistic/academic hubs of the district and inserting public greenspace. The class was taught by Professor Werner Goehner and Visiting Critic Giorgio Martocchia. In December, a project by Justin Foo (B.Arch. ’18) took third place in the Shelter International Architectural Design Competition held in Tokyo. Designed by Foo and Lee Feng, the project proposes an intergenerational public kitchen to support seniors and celebrate meal preparation and “the gentle passing of time.”

Affordable Housing Policy and Programs, Visiting Lecturer Paul Mazzarella Mazzarella, a former director of Ithaca Neighborhood Housing Services, reviewed the origins and evolution of affordable housing programs in the U.S. from the 1930s to the present, and led the class to examine what programs have worked and why—from government involvement in the development and management of affordable housing and how it evolved into market-driven, private-sector approaches; to tax policy in the allocation of housing resources. Recognizing that housing is more than shelter, the success or failure depends on a complex mix of community development issues that include land-use regulations, economic conditions, racial discrimination, access to credit, demographic shifts, wealth accumulation, public health, and crime, among others. Working in small teams, students from all three departments in AAP and other colleges at Cornell delivered two research papers and a case study project at the end of the fall 2018 semester.

The Sectional City: Urban Housing Fabric for Chongqing, Assistant Professor and B.Arch. Coordinator Leslie Lok and Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities Expanded Practice Seminar: Spatial Tensions, Leslie Lok and Andrea Bachner, Comparative Literature The Mellon seminar and Lok’s option studio investigated housing on a combined trip to Chongqing, China. The option studio was dedicated specifically to housing, while the seminar explored additional unique geographic, urban, infrastructural, and cultural transformations looked at through interdisciplinary lenses. With 30 million residents, Chongqing is one of the largest cities in the world and is both geographically compelling as well as urbanistically complex. Built on mountains and situated at the confluence of the Yangtze and the Jialing rivers, “its central core is a multiground city stratified into vertical urban layers while its metropolitan area is surrounded with a mostly rural landscape,” according to the studio syllabus. While the goal of the Mellon seminar was to think through and study how urbanization transforms spatial and social structures in a context of globalization, Lok’s studio examined urban housing in Chongqing to negotiate the city’s unique spatial, topographic,

Manuel Aires Mateus, the fall 2018 Thomas J. Baird Visiting Critic, and Visiting Critic Rodolfo Reis Dias led a studio titled To Inhabit that engaged aspects and atmospheric qualities of home exploration, or “the definition of inhabiting, the value of the inhabited space, the ways and the relations with the inhabiting, the relationship between the body and the space, and the space as function and as absolute value.” Kimberley Mok’s (B.Arch. ’04) book about converted buses was published this summer. The Modern House Bus: Mobile Tiny House Inspirations (Countryman Press, 2018) looks at 12 buses that are part of the so-called skoolie movement. Rizal Sutikno (Ph.D. CRP ’22) received a $3,000 grant from the American-Indonesian Cultural and Educational Foundation for dissertation fieldwork comparing two neighboring informal settlement communities (kampungs) in Malang, East Java, Indonesia. The kampungs are able to avoid evictions by positioning themselves as new tourism icons of Malang City. Antifragile Housing: Neo-Modular Systems, a fall semester studio taught by Visiting Critic Andreas Tjeldflaat, investigated how modularity can galvanize housing into agile systems that can adapt and support the rapidly changing concept of home. Each project team proposed a modular housing scheme in conjunction with a selected program theme (recreation, health, mobility), situated in New York City in the year 2050. Tjeldflaat also delivered a presentation on how 3D printing can address homelessness and the global housing crisis at the U.N.’s Economic Commission for Europe in October. At the 36th Annual Cornell Real Estate Conference held in New York City in October, a panel titled “Design. . . More Important than Ever” included a discussion on the evolution of residential design. The panel included Robert Balder (B.S. URS ’89), Gensler Family Sesquicentennial Director of AAP NYC; Kate Bicknell (B.S. URS ’99); and Gary Handel (B.Arch. ’78), among others.

In High Demand

This type of lowincome, live-work, home-based childcare doesn’t yet exist in Ithaca. It’s exciting because if we can figure out how to make it work, it could have a really positive impact on our community. —SUZANNE LANYI CHARLES

Cornell AAP

and urban milieu. Sectional investigations explored a form of mat urbanism that negotiates the vertical, the horizontal, and the oblique. “This type of layered mat-urbanism could reoffer urban relationships and adjacency absent in most contemporary landscapes of residential towers but formerly present in the Chinese city,” Lok said. “The diverse trajectories that emerged from the course truly benefited from the interdisciplinary conversations of our students.”

Housing +, visiting critics Stella Betts, David Leven, Thomas Phifer, and Gabriel Smith The AAP NYC architecture studio Housing + was an exercise in rethinking the physical, political, and economic environment of Red Hook, Brooklyn, a neighborhood located within New York City’s lowest and most vulnerable flood zone. According to the syllabus, the site’s intense urban mix offered a range of forms, flows, muscular infrastructures, and an industrial past, present, and future experiencing gentrification. Students were tasked with paying particular attention to the needs of urban dwelling with a designcentric approach to housing affordability for the working class, the largest population group in the city. In groups, the students were asked to incorporate community programming such as schools and childcare into their proposals, and to “test the norms and limits of collective personal space.”

THESIS

Architecture Kun Bi’s (M.Arch. ’18) thesis Reimagining City Boundaries: How Hybrid Residential Towers Preserve Agricultural Life looked at the loss of agricultural and natural areas to the rapid expansion of urban centers in China, replaced and pushed out to the city edges by generic residential buildings. Bi’s thesis proposed an experimental design scheme to bring agricultural production back to the city periphery, inserting hybrid residential towers that reconcile urban and village life. Bi’s thesis advisors were architecture faculty Assistant Professor Luben Dimcheff and Visiting Critic Lina Malfona. Using digital technology, Derek Yi’s (M.Arch. ’18) thesis Popocropolis proposed collapsible, customizable load-bearing architectural elements to expand pop-up spaces. Intended for use in “rail towns” dependent on a single, exhaustible revenue source, they could be used for temporary residences, benefiting from incremental capacity and mobility and providing potential for economic growth.

City and Regional Planning Adam Bronfin’s (B.S. URS ’18) undergraduate honors thesis, The Condominium Question: Evaluating the Lack of Condominiums in Ithaca, New York, sought to determine why the market share of condominiums was so low despite a strong overall housing market, expressed demand, and government encouragement. Bronfin interviewed developers, government officials, real estate brokers, lenders, attorneys, and consultants to uncover the factors limiting condominium development in the county despite high demand. He gave a presentation on his findings to the Tompkins County Legislature in May 2018. Bronfin’s thesis advisor was Assistant Professor Suzanne Lanyi Charles. Peter Romano’s (M.R.P./M.P.S. RE ’20) exit project seeks to quantify how college- and graduate-aged student populations influence the housing cost burden ratios for nonstudent renters, that is, families and households. Romano’s interest was sparked by the process of “studentification”—students moving in to neighborhoods and displacing the families that once lived there. Assisted by Cornell’s geospatial reference librarians and CISER, he used IPUMS USA microdata to exclude students from the household cost burden data and to calculate new ratios for 260 metropolitan areas in the U.S. Initial results show that while some of these areas see a dramatic decline in cost burden rates when students are excluded, others see an increase, suggesting that in some traditional college towns, families and households may actually be less cost-burdened than the national average. In Kun Bi’s (M.Arch. ’18) master’s thesis, hybrid residential towers bring agricultural production back to the city periphery and reconcile urban and village life.

By Edith Fikes and Patti Witten

Spring 2019

VOICES

Restoring Her Family’s World War II Jewish Cemetery in Poland By Amy Degen (M.R.P. ’85)

Poland was always on my bucket list, but I never expected to spend my summers there volunteering to restore a Jewish cemetery. I graduated from Cornell AAP with a master of regional planning in 1985. I then worked in community development corporations creating affordable housing until 1995, when my life took an interesting turn—I became a Sunday school teacher and then a Holocaust educator trained by Facing History and Ourselves. In 2015 I attended a workshop in Poland with the Forum for Dialogue; after the seminar, my husband Josh met me in Krakow and we spent two days driving to Bialystok, a city situated in the northeast corner of Poland that had been the home of my maternal grandfather. Bialystok is known for bialys (bagellike bread with onions in the middle), Esperanto (the language of peace), and the recognizable Max Bialystok from the play and movie The Producers. In 1941, Bialystok was a city of 300,000 inhabitants, 50 percent of whom were Jewish. Today there are no more than five Jews living there. Upon our arrival in Bialystok we met our Polish guide, Lucy Lisowska. She gave us a tour of the Jewish history of the city, including the Bagnowka Jewish Cemetery, where she wanted to check on the volunteers from Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, a German-based volunteer organization. They were resetting fallen headstones by hand, restoring two or three per day. I never thought to visit Bagnowka, because my family has no graves in Poland. My great-grandparents were rounded up along with 2,000 other Jews, locked in Bialystok’s Great Synagogue on June 27, 1941, and burned alive. My great-aunt and -uncle and their families were put in the Bialystok Ghetto. My great-aunt was a freedom fighter during the uprising on

August 16, 1943, and presumably died during the resistance. My great-uncle and his family were likely transported to Treblinka, a German death camp a few hours away. If my grandfather had not left Poland in 1928, my family line would have ceased to exist. The Bagnowka Cemetery was established in 1891, and had 30,000 burials. Before the Nazis left Bialystok, they tried to destroy any evidence of a Jewish community and vandalized the cemetery, knocking all the headstones to the ground. During the Cold War, the Communists further damaged the cemetery—many stones have been stolen, broken, and even used for home foundations and city projects. When Josh, a lifelong stone mason and equipment operator, saw the condition of the cemetery, he knew he could help speed up the restoration by lifting 50 stones per day with the proper equipment and labor. We started a GoFundMe page, became a 501c3 nonprofit, and have returned to Bialystok for the past three

summers. To date, we have raised 1,000 stones with hundreds cleaned and painted. One-third of the cemetery has yet to be cleared of vegetation, leaving us with no idea how much restoration remains. Each summer we work 10 hours per day, with 14–20 volunteers for seven to eight days. This project has significantly impacted my life. I cannot reverse the Holocaust that killed two-thirds of the Jews in Europe, including my family. However, I can bring dignity back to the people who were buried in Bialystok before 1941, souls who never knew the horrors that would occur in their Jewish community. There are thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries all over Europe, and I wish we could work full-time saving these cemeteries as well. But at least I know we are contributing to tikun olam, playing our small part in repairing the world. MORE INFORMATION

Facing History and Ourselves facinghistory.org Forum for Dialogue dialog.org.pl/en History of the Bagnowka Cemetery jewishepitaphs.org/bagnowka-cemetery Bialystok Cemetery Restoration bialystokcemeteryrestoration.org or on Facebook @BialystokCemetery Volunteering Information Email bialystokcemeteryrestoration@gmail.com for more information

photo / provided

Cornell AAP

Visiting Faculty Teach Creative and Critical Practice across AAP

The continued expansion of curricular and extracurricular programming at AAP relies heavily on the intellectual rigor and close mentorship of internationally recognized architects, artists, and planners who develop critical practices around pressing issues in their field. In fall 2018, all three departments invited faculty who brought expertise and professional experience to classes and studios across the college.

Fall 2018 opportunities for architecture students to study with visiting faculty included vastly different studios led by jointly appointed Gensler visiting critics Maria Claudia Clemente and Francesco Isidori, the Robert J. Baird Visiting Critic Manuel Aires Mateus and Visiting Critic Rodolfo Reis Dias, and the Strauch Visiting Critic in Sustainable Design Dorte Mandrup and Visiting Associate Professor Marianne Hansen, among others. “Each semester, we invite visiting faculty from around the world to the department to guide our students in rigorous inquiry so that what they make reflects their capacity to think deeply around a specific architectural problem or concept,” says Andrea Simitch, professor and chair of the Department of Architecture. Clemente and Isidori are based in Rome where they founded Labics, an award-winning architecture and urban planning practice. Clemente and Isidori’s studio titled Nothing Stops Detroit centered primarily around the students’ design of an “urban incubator” to address critical issues like low density, low functionality, or low identity, and provide a general model for scrutinizing alternative methods of urban regeneration. “Our experience in the Department of Architecture was very nurturing for us in terms of our own knowledge—both didactic and experiential,” say Clemente and Isidori. “One of the most exciting moments of the semester was our field trip to Detroit with the students. We were able to build a common knowledge in a short time as we explored the city, sharing its human richness, variety, and potentialities beyond its economic struggles. This knowledge was the background and research upon which the students’ final projects were founded.” Mandrup, the Strauch visiting critic, was invited to AAP from Copenhagen, where she is founder and director of her office, Dorte Mandrup. She has 25 years of professional experience and has designed a number of internationally recognized iconic buildings, including the Isfjord Center in Greenland. Mandrup and Hansen’s studio was focused on a glacial site they visited in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. Mateus, cofounder and coprincipal of Aires Mateus, a Lisbon-based architecture office that has won several Portuguese national and international awards, led a studio titled To Inhabit, which centered on designing aspects and atmospheric qualities of the home. Cotaught with Dias, the studio engaged in an eight-day intensive workshop in Lisbon, Portugal. Other fall 2018 visiting critics in architecture included Sarosh Anklesaria, Alejandro Beals, Umberto Bellardi Ricci, Dasha Khapalova, Katharina Kral, Loreto Lyon, Lina Malfona, Danica Selem, and Andreas Tjeldflaat. New York City–based digital media artist Paul Pfeiffer was the Department of Art’s fall 2018 Teiger Mentor in the Arts. Pfeiffer’s work in photography, video, sculpture, and installation has been exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions throughout the U.S. and internationally.

Spring 2019 In Memoriam

Arthur Ovaska 1951–2018 Associate professor of architecture Arthur Ovaska (B.Arch. ’74) died on March 26 at his home in Ithaca. He was 67.

“Paul’s work is said to address the role that mass media plays in shaping our communal consciousness, but what it also seems to me to do is offer us a compelling opportunity to become more empathetic toward one another,” says Carl Ostendarp, associate professor of art and director of graduate studies for the art department. “I had the great pleasure of teaching alongside Paul at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture during the summer of 2016—but my first encounter with his work was at the Greater New York group exhibition at MoMA PS1 in 2000. I have since been enthusiastically following his creative practice and was thrilled when Paul accepted our invitation to take on the Teiger Mentor role.” As Teiger Mentor, Pfeiffer gave a public lecture on his work, led the department’s graduate seminar in theory and art, and arranged visits with individual undergraduate and graduate students in their studios. “Paul’s generosity of time and spirit was ever-present, as he often engaged us in extensive and productive conversations,” says Brice Peterson (M.F.A. ’19). “His visits were challenging and stimulating, while also grounded in a real sense of investment in each of us as artists and individuals. Maintaining an ongoing conversation with an artist of Paul’s intellect and openness has provoked deeper reflection on my own motivations and place in the world and proven to be an incredibly meaningful part of my time at Cornell.” The Teiger Mentor in the Arts Program was created with a gift from late alumnus David Teiger ’51. Teiger was a contemporary art collector and patron of curatorial projects and exhibitions throughout the U.S. and Europe. Pfeiffer was the 11th Teiger Mentor to date. Previous mentors were Sam Lewitt, Dana Hoey, Sean Landers, Craig Kalpakjian, Sam Durant, Sharon Hayes, Leslie Hewitt, Alejandro Cesarco, Shannon Ebner, and Josiah McElheny.

Ovaska served on the Cornell faculty for more than three decades and had an impact on generations of architecture students.

Adam Lubinsky, visiting critic and managing principal at WXY Architecture and Urban Design, cotaught the fall 2018 Urban Design Studio at AAP NYC, with visiting critics Eugenia Di Girolamo and Jacob Dugopolski.

Students in the AAP NYC urban design studio visited their site of inquiry—Red Hook, Brooklyn—on a rainy day in the fall. photo / Leyi Zhang (M.R.P. ’19)

Gensler visiting critics Francesco Isidori and Maria Claudia Clemente at the On the Steps architecture lecture series event, “The Making of Practice,” with Associate Professor Val Warke (far right), moderating.

“Arthur was a creative force in the department’s rise to international prominence,” Kent Kleinman, the former Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of AAP, wrote in a message to the college. “But to many, he was known first and foremost as a remarkable teacher of extraordinary rigor, generosity, and kindness, and he will be sorely missed by the many individuals whose lives he shaped and enriched.” After receiving his undergraduate degree at Cornell, Ovaska began graduate architecture studies with his mentor, professor and department chair O. M. Ungers, collaborating on projects in Ithaca and Cologne, Germany, between 1974 and 1978. He founded the office of Kollhoff and Ovaska in Berlin in 1978 with Hans Kollhoff. The studio produced numerous built works, including buildings in the International Building Exhibition (IBA) Berlin and the master plan for the 1987 exhibition site. Ovaska left Berlin in 1987 to accept an academic position at Cornell. His career included appointments as director of undergraduate studies, director of graduate studies, and chair of the Department of Architecture. “Arthur was a most talented architect, a great educator, and a tireless advocate for students,” said professor and chair of architecture Andrea Simitch. “His work in Berlin established the qualitative bar for the IBA Berlin. He inspired generations of students with his passion for architecture and finding architecture in the most obscure and unexpected places.” “Arthur was part of a rare breed,” said Professor Jerry Wells, “a talented teacher of architecture and an equally talented designer with a long resume of professional practice. The school will miss him, I will miss him, we will all miss him.”

Sandra Annunziata 1980–2019 We note with sadness the passing of Cornell in Rome visiting critic and urban scholar Sandra Annunziata, who passed away on January 4; she was 39 years old. Annunziata had been with Cornell in Rome since 2012, teaching the CRP class European Cities.

Visiting Faculty

Cornell AAP

Studio visit by Paul Pfeiffer, the fall 2018 Teiger Mentor in the Arts, with B.F.A. senior thesis student Steav Kim (B.F.A. ’19).

Robert J. Baird Visiting Critic Manuel Aires Mateus, left, and Visiting Critic Rodolfo Reis Dias, second from upper right, meeting with students in the L. P. Kwee Studios.

Fall 2018 visiting artists, who generally give both a public artist talk and schedule studio visits with graduate students, also included Nydia Blas, Blake Fall-Conroy (B.F.A. ’09), Carrie Moyer, Jackson Polys, Beverly Semmes, and Tuesday Smilie. The Department of City and Regional Planning’s fall 2018 urban design studio at AAP NYC was taught by Adam Lubinsky, visiting critic and managing principal at WXY Architecture and Urban Design, with visiting critics Eugenia Di Girolamo and Jacob Dugopolski. Undergraduates majoring in urban and regional studies (B.S. URS) and master’s candidates in both regional planning (M.R.P.) and landscape architecture (M.L.A.) took part in the studio that is now offered every fall to ensure a direct connection between what students learn in the classroom and what they discover as they conduct research and propose urban design solutions for sites across the New York City area. “This fall we focused on the Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn,” says Lubinsky. “Students proposed a range of design interventions that considered the needs of public housing residents, the challenges of storm surge resiliency and sea-level rise, and transportation access. Their final presentations utilized key urban design principles, and, with their animations, they identified clear urban narratives that supported both local and citywide objectives.” Lubinsky has been a managing principal at WXY Architecture and Urban Design since 2011. He is a fellow of the Urban Design Forum and was named by Fast Company as one of 2017’s “Most Creative People in Business.” Di Girolamo is a senior designer at the Brooklyn Department of Urban Planning, and Dugopolski is a senior associate at WXY. The fall semester at AAP NYC also includes a Professional Practice Colloquium in which students attend a series of talks and a young alumni forum that provides career perspectives of established and emergent planners, all of them AAP alumni. Fall 2018 featured talks by Lane N. Addonizio (M.R.P. ’92), Lena Afridi (M.R.P. ’11), Alyson Fletcher (M.R.P./M.L.A. ’12), Celeste Frye (M.R.P. ’01), Amy Kates (M.R.P. ’87), Mitchell Korbey (M.R.P. ’86), Rob Pirani (M.R.P. ’86), Zoe Siegel (M.R.P. ’16), Max Taffet (M.R.P. ’14), and Eric Wilson (M.R.P. ’00). The young alumni forum included Andrew Buck (M.R.P. ’11), Nicholas Grefenstette (M.R.P./M.L.A. ’17), Raphael Laude (B.S. URS ’18), Sylvia Li (M.R.P. ’14), Dan Moran (M.R.P. ’14), and Rebecca Parelman (M.R.P. ’13). By Edith Fikes

Faculty Retirements Since 2018, several long-standing tenured faculty have retired or entered phased retirement. Their contributions to the distinction and legacy of the college are extensive and invaluable. The AAP community thanks them for their many years of teaching, service, and leadership.

Kieran Donaghy CRP 2007– 2020

George Hascup Architecture 1973 – 2019

Kent Hubbell Architecture 1993 – 2020

Jean Locey Art 1981– 2018

Vince Mulcahy Architecture 1983 – 2018

Barry Perlus Art 1985 – 2019

Stan Taft Art 1985 – 2020

Jerry Wells Architecture 1965 – 2021

Spring 2019

VOICES

Caroline O’Donnell Is a “Next Progressive” ARCHITECT magazine profiles Edgar A. Tafel Professor of Architecture Caroline O’Donnell’s firm, CODA

Tripe (An Offally Little Library) is a permanent outdoor mini library in Buffalo, New York, created under the direction of CODA.

MISSION: We [CODA] think about architecture as a dialogue with the environment. As a result, the responsive forms that emerge in our design process can be unusual. We often use unconventional materials to help tell this story, such as grilling wood, skateboard waste, plastic chairs, decomposable materials, charred wood, and mirrors. And our projects often react dynamically in real time to changing seasons, users, or programs. FIRST COMMISSION: Party Wall, the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program pavilion in Long Island City, New York, in 2013. The project was a 100-foot-long, 40-foot-tall installation made out of skateboard waste and leftover steel that cast a shadow spelling “wall.” The shape of the structure hinted that there was a message to be deciphered, though it was illegible most of the time. It was a reference to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s notion of architecture as a sign, and ties into the historic legacy of signs in the neighborhood. FAVORITE PROJECT: Bloodline, a self-

consuming grilling pavilion, in Stuttgart, Germany. Through the analysis of the lineage of two existing castles, we proposed a third structure, transforming between a geometrically perfect form, implied by the first castle, and a more asymmetrical and functional “fire-space,” implied by the second. The literal transformation of the pavilion over the summer is enabled by the grillholz (local barbecue wood) facade that is burned as the pavilion is used. Through its transformative nature and misuse of materials, this pavilion provided important foundations on which many of our following projects are built. YOUR DECISION TO BECOME AN

anything else and, in many ways, I am still doing just that. GREATEST MENTOR: When I moved to the

U.S., I learned something that may have been obvious to everyone educated in this country but was a new idea for me—that architecture could communicate, that it could “say something.” Peter Eisenman (B.Arch. ’55) taught me that in studio at Princeton University, and I immersed myself in those ideas as I worked for a few years in his office after graduate school. But, as I connected this thinking with my earlier education in bioclimatics, I wondered why the messages that architecture conveyed were always selfreferential. I wondered why architecture might not say something about the world outside itself. I have been working on that question since starting CODA, and I have to thank both Peter and my mentors in Manchester—Greg Keeffe and Geoff McKennan—for introducing me to very different modes of thinking that I would later be able to connect.

ADVICE FOR YOUR YOUNGER SELF: Don’t

plan—just do what’s interesting and challenging to you. If I had made plans— and stuck to them—my life would have been much less interesting. THE BEST ADVICE YOU HAVE EVER RECEIVED: Persevere. DESIGN ADVICE YOU LIKE TO GIVE: Design is not about objects, it’s about relationships. WHAT SHOULD ARCHITECTS BE DISCUSSING THIS YEAR? The political situation and the multiple urgent socioeconomic and environmental issues facing this country are becoming increasingly present in our lives. We are thinking about the nature of our role as architects in engaging with questions of climate change, material depletion, national identity, and so on. How can we draw these issues into contemporary architectural practice and theory so that we can generate new ideas and new worlds rather than simply problem solving? WHEN I’M NOT WORKING IN ARCHITECTURE, I: Box and cook, but never at the same time.

ARCHITECT: The street that I grew up on

in Ireland was always under construction. As a child I played in foundations and half-built houses. I never wanted to do

Written by Sarah Rafson and excerpted from an article posted on February 7. Read the full story at architectmagazine.com/practice/coda_o

Cornell in Rome and AAP NYC

CORNELL IN ROME

“‘It may be that artists are not really meant to reveal truth or explain truth, but rather the mechanism of how things work.’ Perhaps from this vantage point, we can also feel inspired to create our personal strategies to navigate the world of Rome as artists this semester!” Hyo-Jung Song (B.F.A. ’20), quoting a lecture by Marco Tirelli at Cornell in Rome, September 2018. Read the full blog blogs.cornell.edu/cornellinrome/2018/09/26/ marco-tirelli-i-have-imagined-my-entire-life

Jordan Kelly (B.F.A. ’20), prow[ess] (fem): allegoria della sua (2018), acrylic and gouache on canvas, 65 cm x 90 cm, for the fall 2018 Rome Art Studio taught by Visiting Critic Luca Padroni.

Cornell AAP

Spring 2019

AAP NYC

Reimagining the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal Led each fall by Robert W. Balder, Gensler Family Sesquicentennial Executive Director of AAP NYC, the Land Use, Environmental Planning, and Urban Design Workshop is held in partnership with civic organizations or government agencies based in New York City. The project culminates with an hour-long presentation and submission of a written report to the clients. One of the workshops undertaken in fall 2018 focused on the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Cruise Terminal Programming Study CLIENT New York City Economic Development Corporation,

Ports and Transportation and Asset Management Divisions; Andrew Genn (B.S. URS ’89), senior vice president of Ports and Transportation; Max Taffet (M.R.P. ’14), vice president of Ports and Transportation; Mike DeMeo, vice president of Cruise; and Serin Choi ’14, cruise and public markets associate STUDENT TEAM Eduardo Carmelo Danobeytia (B.S. URS ’19),

Lucy Wu ’19, Jie Li ’19, and Jaynel Santos (M.R.P./M.L.A. ’19)

The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) is the city’s primary vehicle for promoting economic growth and oversees and plans for the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal (BCT), which opened for business in Red Hook in 2007. The BCT was designed and built as an international cruise terminal with capacity to berth some of the largest cruise ships in the world. The terminal was opened to capture more of the burgeoning cruise business, which is predominantly operated out of Manhattan. While cruise port activity is mainly seasonal, there are substantial opportunities to increase vessel calls and other noncruise uses to BCT during slow periods. However, since BCT is built for large events and serves as an international gateway akin to an airport, programming and public use on noncruise days can be challenging. “The BCT was adapted from a former bulk import and export pier and has some 200,000 square feet of flexible terminal space and a large parking lot,” says Taffet. “The unfortunate reality is that the terminal can feel cold for visitors from land and water, and it’s hard to understand how the site relates to the city or surrounding neighborhood.” The AAP NYC student team was tasked with exploring surface improvements (paint, fencing, signage, programming, and

The Brooklyn Cruise Terminal has the capacity to berth some of the largest cruise ships in the world.

A rendering demonstrates connectivity of the site with aspects of Red Hook and greater Brooklyn.

A food court and shops occupy the terminal space in this rendering.

moving walls and operations within the terminal) as ways to grow BCT as a community and business asset. After conducting a thorough site analysis, examining relevant case studies, and interviewing stakeholder groups, the team recommended a comprehensive plan that would make the space more welcoming and promote wayfinding inside the terminal. Further, the team suggested additional integration of the site between assets of Red Hook and greater Brooklyn, coupled with better connectivity to nearby transportation, making the terminal less remote. “With fresh eyes and a thorough analysis, the students delivered an impressive final presentation,” says Taffet. “Graphics produced by the team have served as fodder for ongoing discussions on how to make the terminal more active and welcoming.” “Linking the adjacent community to the terminal through design interventions and wayfinding was one of the compelling findings of the students’ report,” echoes Genn. “Having reviewed these presentations over the years, I’ve seen how the work consistently benefits the students by giving them real-world experience in responding to planning challenges in a setting that closely mimics what we do on a regular basis.”

From the Department Visiting Critic Gesa Büttner Dias, left, during design review for the fall 2018 option studio To Inhabit, taught by Robert J. Baird Visiting Critic Manuel Aires Mateus and Visiting Critic Rodolfo Reis Dias. The studio included a field trip to Lisbon where students considered the richness of personal experience by creating a project for a specific atmosphere within a site. “. . .The 12 yet unbuilt houses are like the tale of an invisible city within Lisbon 2018, like a reverse journey of Marco Polo, with people of distinct backgrounds bringing their architectural memories to one city and making another.” —Gesa Büttner Dias, visiting critic

Architectu

ure

Spring 2019

Architecture

Visual Representation Elective: Drawing the Invisible Faculty: Visiting critics Alejandro Beals and Loreto Lyon Project: In Praise of Shadows by Isabel Brañas Jarque (M.Arch. ’19)

Cornell AAP

Spring 2019

Option Studio: Conditions: Architectural Interventions in the Arctic

Conditions “. . . It is essential to recognize that extraordinary contextual architecture only develops by moving above and beyond mere observation. The meticulous exploration of contextual particularities is fundamental to develop an architecture entirely exclusive to situation and place. And although imperative for all architectural endeavors, observation must be paired with an advantageous and subjectively established point of entry. Consider a funnel, wide at the top and narrow underneath. First, the broad scope of differing site-specific conditions is collected and curated using the broad end of our hypothetical funnel. This procedure is refined by a continuous ping-pong of prototyping and analyzing, gradually informing a concise and well-versed interpretation of the place at hand. Now, one can act from the narrow end of the funnel—from a well-defined point of entry. Having distilled the essentials of the context, it is from here, through careful refinement, that the content can ‘thicken’ in complexity. This funneling procedure establishes a valuable constraint in the design scope, adding depth and calibrated focus. The relationship between the delicate physicality of a building and the vastness of the Greenlandic landscape offers the potential to work within an immense range of scales: spatially, through architectural interventions linking the large scale of the natural elements to that of the body, and temporally, in conjunction with the climatic and geological conditions that shift not just from moment to moment and season to season, but also on an evolutional scale of anticipated increasing climate change. . .” —Dorte Mandrup and Marianne Hansen

Faculty: Strauch Visiting Critic in Sustainable Design Dorte Mandrup and Visiting Associate Professor Marianne Hansen Project: Trail to a Feast by Chen Qin (M.S. AAD ’19)

Architecture Architectural Genre as Trojan Horse “Is it possible for an act of architecture to be invited in through the front door, and then to proceed to mess with the furnishings? Is it possible for an apparently familiar work to nudge an anaesthetized audience from their complacency? Is it possible for architecture— normally the mute, compliant servant of a relatively inert social order—to introduce perceptions that would otherwise be repressed? . . . Most architecture seems to operate through genres, with the subtlety and disingenuousness one would expect from a high art. And embedded in the genres of ‘popular’ architecture—not simply the blatant branding of franchised drive-thrus (meticulously premeditated contrivances, really), but the Moose lodges, the health clubs, the organic food markets, the amusement piers, the biker bars, the mirror-glassed office buildings, the exotically trussed sport venues—there linger the biases, aspirations, and discursive interrelationships of a multitude of cultures and subcultures. It is our hope that in penetrating this embeddedness, we might bring to the surface a lexicon of formal significations as written and read by a public.” —Val Warke Option Studio: Trojan Horses: Smuggling Cognizance through Genre Faculty: Associate Professor Val Warke Project: H&M X Squatter Villa @ Berlin by Birsen Başak Akman (B.Arch. ’19)

Cornell AAP

Spring 2019

Building the City “. . . The city is a complex organism, made up of a set of material and immaterial elements or factors that contribute to define it in its physical and symbolic form. There are therefore the threedimensional structures, the set of artifacts that give shape to the urban landscape and that include its monuments, public services, religious services, places for work, and houses, as the open spaces that combine to define its shape: the streets, the squares, the places of encounter. The set of all these physical structures constitutes what the Latins called urbs. This complex of the tangible and intangible structures of a city form the civitas. So, to build a city it is not enough to work only on its physical structure, the urbs, but it is necessary to work to build the civitas, or the right to belonging to the city community. Current urban transformations are characterized by a dominant idea of closure dictated by fear or private interests. It becomes urgent, in this context, to strongly reaffirm the role of architecture as a tool capable of contributing, with the methods that are proper to it, to the construction of shared spaces and the role of cities as places of integration, acceptance, openness to the other. Without civitas there is no city, at least as we know it in the Western world. . . .” —Maria Claudia Clemente and Francesco Isidori

Option Studio: Nothing Stops Detroit Faculty: Gensler visiting critics Maria Claudia Clemente and Francesco Isidori Project: .5House by Fabiana Berenguer Gil (B.Arch. ’19)

From the Department At the start of the spring semester, the Department of Art brought artist Kota Ezawa, right, to campus for a lecture and exhibition. Ezawa also met with art students in the studio, including Libby Rosa (M.F.A.â&#x20AC;&#x2030;â&#x20AC;&#x2122;19), left.

Cornell AAP

Evolution of Practice By Renate Ferro, director of undergraduate studies, art

In the fall of 2018, the Department of Art welcomed the class of 2022. This class of budding artists is the first to experience the new bachelor of fine arts (B.F.A.) curriculum. In conceiving and implementing the curriculum, art faculty agreed that an overhaul was needed in response to a shifting global contemporary art world that acknowledges the diverse ways of making and disseminating art. Individualized Curriculum

Senior B.F.A. thesis students invited first-years to a studio open house at the start of the spring semester.

BACKGROUND

Christina Welzer (B.F.A. ’19), Listen to the World (2018), digital collage and silver marker, 60 1/2" x 42".

The nature of a meaningful art practice has progressively moved toward nontraditional and non-medium-specific work that must connect and integrate an inclusive range of real-world concerns. To that end, the B.F.A. program grants students access to university electives according to the student’s unique art practice by developing not only studio work and technical expertise but extensive research beyond art practice. Through a rigorous and individualized advising and mentoring model, faculty meet with students regularly with an intent to advance an individualized elective plan. Bringing the practice and research together is realized in the final three semesters when students enroll in independent and thesis studios. Throughout the curriculum, all students incorporate a critical component into their practice through individual and group critique allowing them to question the assumptions they make about their ideas. In February, senior thesis students welcomed first-year students who are part of this new curriculum to a studio open house. The advanced students displayed their diverse work and shared ideas giving first-year students a chance to ask questions. The visit gave students a peek at the different opportunities that can be developed in a four-year individualized curriculum plan.

Spring 2019

Outside Perspectives The Visiting Artist’s Lecture Series gives all B.F.A. students a chance to interact with professional artists. Eight to 10 artists each semester are invited to deliver an artist’s talk and visit students for personal critiques. Recently, artist Zach Blas, who works between London and New York City, delivered the annual Tenaglia Lecture. Sponsored by a grant from the Tenaglia family, the lecture fund invites important artists to share their work in a public lecture and also provide a personal presence in the department to talk about issues pertaining to artists. In Blas’s talk, he shared his cross-disciplinary practice that melds moving image, performance, science, and technology. During a roundtable lunch he met with students to discuss topics including artist residencies, artist grants, living and working between two continents, and how to share work with the public through curators and galleries.

Senior thesis students Jacqueline Davies (B.F.A. ’19), left, and Christina Welzer (B.F.A. ’19) working in the studio.

Guest artist Zach Blas visited a class taught by Renate Ferro, visiting associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in art. Blas’s lecture and visit were supported by the Tenaglia family.

Cornell AAP

Pinch Point Pinch Point, the first of two group shows presented by the Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) program cohort each year, was held for two weeks in October in Olive Tjaden and Experimental galleries, and concluded with the customary all-faculty critique. The show presented a multitude of disciplines including installation, animation, sculpture, collage, painting, drawing, and more. Pinch Point did not have a collective theme, but instead highlighted each student’s individual work within the gallery spaces. For the graduating class, the show serves as a presentation of growth through the program, while the first-years introduce the faculty to their work at the beginning of the program. The two-year M.F.A. program in art promotes both interdisciplinary and medium-specific practices, and questions a pedagogy informed by Western models of art.

A spring exhibition will be held in New York City in May. Exhibiting artists included second-year M.F.A. students Bruno Cançado (M.F.A. ’19), Vladislav Markov (M.F.A. ’19), Chet Moye (M.F.A. ’19), Brice Peterson (M.F.A. ’19), Libby Rosa (M.F.A. ’19), and Sophia Starling (M.F.A. ’19); and first-year M.F.A. students Yasmeen Abedifard (M.F.A. ’20), Patrick Brennan (M.F.A. ’20), Ege Okal (M.F.A. ’20), Ciara Stack (M.F.A. ’20), Emma Ulen-Klees (M.F.A. ’20), and Alexis White (M.F.A. ’20).

Spring 2019

Work by Bruno Cançado (M.F.A. ’19).

Brice Peterson (M.F.A. ’19), The Strange Case (1991, Designing Women) (2018), inkjet prints and assorted metal frames on department store display, 42" x 42" x 57".

The all-faculty critique is an integral feature of the M.F.A. group show.

Assistant Professor Daniel Torop.

Work by Alexis White (M.F.A. ’20).

From left, work by Libby Rosa (M.F.A. ’19) and Vladislav Markov (M.F.A. ’19).

Ciara Stack (M.F.A. ’20).

Planning

From the Department A reception for Mel Ziegler’s exhibition 1000 Portraits, in Bibliowicz Family Gallery, was one of many events held during the 2018 Atkinson Forum—“Place, Memory, and the Public Monument”—presented by the Department of City and Regional Planning and the Atkinson Forum in American Studies at Cornell. Pictured from right are CRP associate professor and director of undergraduate studies Thomas J. Campanella; Department Chair Jeffrey Chusid; Maria Park, associate professor of art and director of AAP exhibitions and events; Edward Ayers, keynote speaker; and Ziegler, far left.

Planning

Cornell AAP

Place, Memory, and the Public Monument The power of monuments to speak to us, as individuals and communities, has been brought to the fore in dramatic fashion with the removal of Confederate statues and memorials throughout the South in recent years.

Panelists Emily Bergeron (Ph.D. CRP ’17), left, and Sandra E. Greene, the Stephen ’59 and Madeline ’60 Anbinder Professor of African History.

Panelist Erika Doss.

Panelist Patricia C. Phillips, left, and panelist and exhibitor Mel Zeigler.

Heated debate was conducted in cities including Baltimore, Memphis, and New Orleans, when these memorials were relocated or destroyed, culminating in the clash between white supremacists and activists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, when an activist was struck by a car and killed. But beyond eliciting such visceral reactions, monuments are an integral component of community development, of establishing place and history, and defining culture, according to Jeffrey Chusid, chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning. In November, Chusid used the recent controversy surrounding Civil War monuments as the foundation for a conversation about how communities identify people and places for commemoration, and how those choices are implemented through planning, design, and art. That discussion, titled “Place, Memory, and the Public Monument,” was conducted under the auspices of the Atkinson Forum in American Studies at Cornell. The two-day symposium was paired with an exhibition, 1000 Portraits, especially commissioned for the forum from the artist Mel Ziegler. The symposium included presentations by a historian, an architect, a cultural observer, artists, and other Cornell faculty. The exhibition, which featured multiple vernacular reproductions of the four presidents from Mt. Rushmore, served as a provocation to the symposium attendees as well as Ziegler’s own response to the phenomenon of souvenirs as a kind of second-order form of memorialization.

Edward Ayers, Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond, delivered the keynote address, “Reckoning with Ourselves: Principle and Persuasion in Remembering the Civil War.” As a Civil War historian, Ayers is well versed on the monuments representing that era and their impact on the local and national consciousness. He described his work with the City of Richmond, Virginia, which formed a commission to evaluate what to do with the large number of Confederate statues on Monument Avenue. Meetings with many local community groups led him to the conclusion that “Debates over Civil War statues allow those statues, after a long silence, to speak to us again. It turns out we still have things to learn from them, but not always what their builders hoped to teach,” he said. Any conversation about monuments must confront the history people think those monuments represent, he noted, but it seldom does. “We need a better language of persuasion. Not merely more reasoned and measured, but fuller and more accurate,” he said. “I would prefer that the large number of people who think the Confederacy fought for states’ rights understood the only right they fought for was the right to extend perpetual bondage across the rest of the continent.” The monument dispute provides an opportunity to dispel these distortions of the truth about the Civil War and its cause, Ayers said. “The great Civil War monument is yet to be built, yet to be imagined,” he said. “It will need to help us remember the nearly 800,000 Americans who died, and the four

million Americans freed. It will need to find its language—a language worthy of the stories that we need to remember.” Chusid, in his talk, touched on the importance of monuments and memorials to planning. “We know that they project, or advance, political goals and intentions and often involve a public political process to make them happen. They also often represent, facilitate, or further economic goals and development schemes,” he said. In addition to expressing or affirming a community’s values, he noted, monuments and memorials are physical elements within the cultural landscape. “They have materiality, which involves craftspeople; and builders and design, which involves artists. They have scale. Some are hardly noticeable; others impact their surroundings significantly, often becoming important elements of urban design,” he said.

Monuments and memorials have scale. Some are hardly noticeable; others impact their surroundings significantly, often becoming important elements of urban design. —JEFFREY CHUSID

Spring 2019

Symposium keynote speaker Edward Ayers.

An audience member during the Q&A following Ayers’s keynote address.

Chusid presented memorials in Los Angeles; Mostar, Bosnia; and Berlin as sites where public history, place, and community intersect. In L.A., the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument was designed to recognize the Mexican history of the city by creating an artificial Mexican street and marketplace that remains a popular tourist attraction. The Stari Most bridge in Mostar, built in 1566, was destroyed in 1993 during the war in Yugoslavia, in what Chusid said was described as “an act of killing memory.” The bridge, with local support, was reconstructed 15 years ago, a memorial of conciliation that made international headlines. Chusid continued his discussion of wars and memorials with a look at Berlin and its vast array of monuments and memorials both large and small. They include monuments and statuary from wars past that have been repurposed and placed in a new context, stones that

commemorate the victims of Nazi oppression, and an old church ruin converted into one component of a modern memorial. J. Meejin Yoon (B.Arch. ’95), an architect and designer of the firm Höweler + Yoon Architects and the newly appointed Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of AAP, is creating a special place at the University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville to memorialize the enslaved laborers who built and worked at the university in the 19th century. That memorial, comprising a large circular form built in a field on the grounds formerly used as a garden worked by the enslaved, was designed with significant input from the university and local community, she explained. “UVA did not designate a site, a budget, or scale. But they did designate that the memorial should come out of a true and genuine community engagement process,” Yoon explained. “That is really a challenge, because not everyone feels comfortable even coming to community engagement meetings.” Yoon and her team of designers and artists visited local schools and churches. They provided an online survey and an Instagram account to share the planning process. The result is the Freedom Ring, an open space designed for public gatherings and tied to the city’s annual Freedom Day march and celebration. It includes names of the enslaved carved into a stone memorial, and “recognizes the life and the resiliency of the enslaved and the human spirit,” she said. The symposium also included a presentation by Erika Doss, professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame; and a panel discussion featuring Thomas J. Campanella, associate

professor and director of undergraduate studies in CRP; Sandra E. Greene, the Stephen ’59 and Madeline ’60 Anbinder Professor of African History at Cornell; Emily Bergeron (Ph.D. CRP ’17), assistant professor in the Department of Historic Preservation at the University of Kentucky; and Jennifer Minner, assistant professor in CRP. Artist Mel Ziegler’s work, 1000 Portraits, was on display in Bibliowicz Family Gallery in Milstein Hall from October 11 to November 15. The artist, curator, and former art department chair, Patricia Phillips, held an evening discussion of Ziegler’s work and career, much of which has focused on the act of commemoration and the importance of memory. By Jay Wrolstad

The great Civil War monument is yet to be built, yet to be imagined. It will need to help us remember the nearly 800,000 Americans who died, and the four million Americans freed. It will need to find its language— a language worthy of the stories that we need to remember. —EDWARD AYERS

Planning

Assistant Professor Jennifer Minner’s seminar visited Assembly House 150, an adapted church in Buffalo, New York, developed by Dennis Maher (B.Arch. ’99), Associate Professor John Zissovici, and Ethan Davis (M.Arch. ’18), with assistance from Daniel Salomon (B.Arch. ’12).

Cornell AAP

Spring 2019

Just Places Students in Assistant Professor Jennifer Minner’s spring seminar class gained a new appreciation of how creative practices can impact the preservation and adaptation of communities with a field trip to Buffalo, New York, that included a tour of Assembly House 150, a repurposed church that houses an innovative buildingarts training program. The class, titled Just Places? Community Preservation, Art, and Equity, reflects Minner’s interest in creative place-making. “I want students to think about all of the important and interesting issues around community preservation and the role of art, and also equitable planning,” says Minner. “How do artistic practices and arts organizations shape, interpret, and help us remember a city’s past?” She cites the Society for the Advancement of Construction Related Art (SACRA), run by the Assembly House organization, established and directed by Dennis Maher (B.Arch. ’99) in the converted church, as a prime example of this collaboration between creativity and community preservation. SACRA offers a 15-week training initiative focused on the building arts that serves members of underresourced communities in Buffalo. It was developed in collaboration with the Innovation Lab of the AlbrightKnox Art Gallery in Buffalo, with a project-based curriculum that teaches skills in carpentry and woodworking while incorporating design arts. Participants are trained to make windows, cabinets, porches, and other amenities that contribute to preserving historic homes and other historic buildings throughout the city. They are prepared for careers in construction-related fields through hands-on instruction, workshops by specialists, visits to significant architectural landmarks, exposure to career paths through field trips and presentations by invited guests, and job readiness coaching and job placement services. “Visiting Assembly House gives you a sense of time,” Minner says. “What other place in the country is there an arts-based training program like this? It has implications for preservationists and urban planners who are thinking about community economic development. It gives students a sense of time and place, and how art contributes to that. And planners who are thinking about community economic development can learn from that.”

Central features of Assembly House were designed by architecture’s Associate Professor John Zissovici and Ethan Davis (M.Arch. ’18), in collaboration with Maher. That included the creation of two “buildings within the building,” establishing a new crossing within the transept of the church. The two tower-like structures were assembled from prefabricated structural insulated panels and designed to receive augmentations and enhancements by future Assembly House collaborators, including SACRA participants, university students, and other collaborators. The interiors of the towers provide environments for a building arts library and a presentation space. Daniel Salomon (B.Arch. ’12) provided construction assistance for the project and served as lead instructor for the SACRA program in 2018, supervising and facilitating the build-out of the towers by the first class of the SACRA program. Minner adds, “There’s a lot that preservationists and planners can learn from artists, and vice versa.” That includes examining the relationship between creative practices and an expanded view of community preservation. “It’s about preserving the communities that are in place—the existing physical environment and the social environment, creating healthy partnerships and connections between historic preservation, artists, and community development organizations.” Minner first learned of Maher’s creative endeavors in 2013 through an article in the New York Times. At the time she was living and studying in Austin, Texas. She rediscovered his artwork when she began teaching at Cornell and his sculpture, Common Cosmos: 287 F-14853, was featured in the Sibley Dome. In 2017, Maher’s Fargo House was included on a field trip for Minner’s Equity Preservation workshop. In that class, students mapped communitybased preservation and building reuse efforts in Buffalo. Today, says Minner, many people have lost touch with the beautiful, creative ways of maintaining and preserving objects in the built environment—of preserving place. “We have all these changing technologies, and ways of producing the built environment, and too often we don’t think about how to take care of that environment,” she says. “What I love about SACRA is that it shows how the arts and craft can be integral to taking care of a built environment, which is continually evolving. It takes creative imagination to address the issues involved with sustaining communities.” By Jay Wrolstad

Students at The Freedom Wall mural, part of the ongoing Albright-Knox Art Gallery Public Art Initiative.

Students view an environmental installation at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

Cornell AAP

Alumni Projects

’05 ’05

Hou de Sousa: Prismatic Josh de Sousa (B.Arch. ’05) and Nancy Hou’s (B.Arch. ’05) kaleidoscopic sculpture, Prismatic, was a site-specific installation created for the sixth annual Georgetown GLOW light art experience in Washington, DC’s Georgetown Waterfront Park. De Sousa and Hou are the founders of Hou de Sousa, a New York City–based architecture, art, and design studio. Assembled in Brooklyn and fitted by design for transport on a 46-foot flatbed truck, Prismatic’s rebar lattices were welded together, painted, and interwoven with iridescent cord, producing a moiré effect. Prisms radiating from a central point echoed features of the site, such as the outline of a water fountain and pathways, as well as the Potomac River, which then split and spread the box apart. The result was a diverse array of apertures and perspectives, collectively focused on a central core, but shaped by the viewer’s vantage point and relative position inside or outside the sculpture. Recent architecture graduates Ji Eun Lee (B.Arch. ’18) and Jiacheng Xu (M.Arch.II ’18) were part of the project team. Georgetown GLOW is a curated exhibition of outdoor public light art installations held from the end of November through early January. photo / Hou de Sousa

’86

An Undeniable Voice Price Arana’s Film is a Labor of Courage and Friendship Writer, director, and advertising executive Price Arana’s (B.F.A. ’86) journey from painting student to award-winning filmmaker has been wide-ranging, eventually leading her to directing a documentary film that has won nine awards from various film festivals worldwide, including best documentary from the 2018 Paris Art and Movie Awards, and best juried documentary from the 2018 Haifa International Film Festival. An Undeniable Voice (2016) documents the dramatic story of Sam Harris (born Szlamek Rzeznik), who was a child survivor of the Holocaust. He sailed with other child refugees to America in 1947, and was adopted by a loving family and became Samuel R. Harris. Arana grew up across the street from Harris and his family and remains close to them. Harris was among the survivors who established the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, Illinois—site of a neo-Nazi uprising in the 1970s. In 2009, Arana attended the

Spring 2019

opening of the museum and witnessed dignitaries and 12,000 guests rise to their feet for Sam. Her friend, actress and film executive Sharon Stone, knew Sam’s story and envisioned the documentary with Arana directing. Stone financed, produced, and named the film. Arana credits a fundamental lesson learned at AAP for much of her professional success, including her work in the film industry. “There is nothing wrong with rejection. We learned in art class that it’s all subjective—it’s what makes the world diverse and beautiful. I learned to be fearless—Cornell empowered me that way.” Reflecting on a visit to campus last fall, Arana says she was surprised that she was not more intimidated when she first came to Cornell as an art student. “I’m still so in awe of the school,” she says. “Here, you’re among the best and brightest.” Arana took those lessons to heart. As the daughter of a photographer, she grew up with a camera in her hands, and immediately after graduating went to work as a photographer for Kodak, covering the America’s Cup race in Australia. She approached Sports Illustrated, Sail, and other magazines, leading to more work and travel for clients like Rolex and Swissair. “I learned to knock on every door. I was not the best photographer out there, but I was not afraid to ask someone to look at my work,” she says. “Needless to say, it was an exhilarating time.” When she wasn’t traveling for a photo assignment, Arana worked part-time at a California ad agency and got to know the business. Two years later she launched her

Los Angeles–based advertising agency, the Press Cabinet, in 1998. “We are considered disrupters, known for innovative campaigns and for launching iconic, out-of-the-box brands,” she says. These include cosmetics, resort hotels, and The Ashram Cookbook: The Way We Eat (Assouline, 2018) for L.A.’s renowned health and wellness retreat. “Who would have imagined that a cookbook could be an ad campaign?” she says. In addition to high-profile cosmetics, hotel, and aviation clients, Arana and her firm have created pro bono advertising campaigns for nonprofit causes and organizations such as Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, Shoe4Africa, and Blessings in a Backpack, among others. She is a founding member of the Exodus Institute, which addresses the issues of forced migration, and sits on the board of directors for Visionary Women, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing the status of women. The award-winning documentary she codirected and executive produced is an extension of Arana’s drive to give back— and to give back to current students. In April, AAP Connect and the Department of Art presented a screening of An Undeniable Voice, followed by a Q&A with Arana and Harris. Arana hopes for more screenings for the film, for it to be used to educate worldwide. “Sam’s story should be told to everyone,” she says. “We want to honor him and those who perished. They are not forgotten.” By Patti Witten

Sam’s story should be told to everyone. We want to honor him and those who perished. They are not forgotten. —PRICE ARANA

Sharon Stone with Sam Harris at the opening of An Undeniable Voice.

Alumni Projects

Cornell AAP

’10

Cowell and Peers Launch New Disaster Resilience and Risk Management Program at Virginia Tech Margaret (Maggie) Cowell (Ph.D. CRP ’10), an associate professor of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech, helped to envision and launch a new, transdisciplinary graduate education program in disaster resilience and risk management (DRRM). “We launched the graduate program in DRRM to promote a transdisciplinary experience designed to better understand alternatives to how we respond to and recover from the devastating economic and natural disasters that now regularly ravage communities

and ecosystems across the globe,” says Cowell. “Our aim is to develop modes of thinking and problem solving that take us beyond outdated approaches based primarily on the perspective of a single discipline.” The program began in 2018, and receives funding from the National Science Foundation to offer opportunities to graduate students who work with faculty who specialize in business information technology, civil and environmental engineering, engineering education, geosciences, public and international affairs, urban affairs, and planning. The broad and interdisciplinary constitution of the program’s faculty and participating students demonstrates the array of physical and social sciences that can be associated with disaster resilience. “Now in our inaugural year, DRRM scholars who bring both interest and dedication to their individual fields as well as to disaster response

’95

Our aim is to develop modes of thinking and problem solving that take us beyond outdated approaches based primarily on the perspective of a single discipline. —MARGARET COWELL

are posing exciting questions that drive new research,” notes Cowell. “We are currently developing a working paper titled ‘Management of Resilience in Civil Infrastructure Systems: An Interdisciplinary Approach.’ Outputs like these are largely a product of our transdisciplinary thinking seminar and weekly research group meetings with DRRM faculty, scholars, and guest speakers.” Scholars who participate in the program engage in classroom and experiential

learning, travel to specialized conferences or research sites, intern at DRRM host organizations, and receive a DRRM graduate certificate. “We are already looking forward to the second year and to welcoming a new cohort of transdisciplinary scholars,” adds Cowell. “One aspect of the DRRM program that I am really excited about is the potential for its steady expansion with events like workshops with community members, local governments, and nonprofit agencies; a series of collaborative research papers; and conference presentations across the component disciplines. We’re in the process of planning the first of three such workshops that we’ll offer in spring 2020.”

More about DRRM drrm.fralin.vt.edu/ index.php

Art Alum’s Documentary Nominated for Regional Emmy In November, the Chicago/Midwest chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences nominated Brett Schwartz (B.A./B.F.A. ’95) for a Regional Emmy in the cultural documentary category, for his film Más Que la Playa (More Than the Beach). The film is an intimate look at the Mexican Pacific coast resort town of Puerto Vallarta, from beyond the hotel compounds and beaches. In the 17-minute documentary, local men and women speaking in both Spanish and English talk about ways they thrive and persevere within the resort community. Their stories are interwoven with scenes of work and home—a hotel, a nursing home, a Pilates studio, a group music lesson, and a residence. Más Que la Playa is an international coproduction commissioned by the sister cities of Highland Park, Illinois, and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, directed by Schwartz and Sebastián Hernández. Schwartz teaches film and TV production, journalism, and history at Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Illinois. His feature-length documentary, Insatiable: The Homaro Cantu Story, premiered at the SXSW film festival in 2014, and his work has aired on several cable TV networks, including Bravo, MSNBC, HGTV, Court TV, CBS, and PBS. After earning concurrent undergraduate degrees in photography and history from Cornell, Schwartz received a master’s degree in documentary film and video production from Stanford University, and an M.A. in social studies education from New York University. Schwartz filming on location in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. photo / provided

Spring 2019

’73 ’91

Architect and Painter Carl Laubin Receives Henry Hope Reed Award

Metiendo Vivendum: A Tribute to Sir Edwin Lutyens O.M. (2014), oil on canvas, 59" x 102". Built and unbuilt works of Sir Edwin Lutyens, shown at the same scale to indicate comparative sizes. Painting in the collection of Sir Terry Farrell at Great Maytham Hall, Kent.

Carl Laubin (B.Arch. ’73) is the recipient of the 2019 Henry Hope Reed Award. The $50,000 prize is presented annually by the University of Notre Dame to an individual working outside the practice of architecture who has supported the culture of the traditional city through its architecture and art. “I was delighted to learn I was to be given the Henry Hope Reed Award and to be the first artist to receive it,” says Laubin. “It is a truly humbling experience to join such a list of distinguished past recipients. I owe a great debt to Cornell and to Colin Rowe for setting me on this course.” Laubin is recognized primarily as a painter of architectural capricci—paintings that encompass a landscape where buildings or ruins come together in a fantastical, and often highly detailed, imagined assembly. While his work centers on architecture, it

also includes many landscapes, paintings of sculpture, and occasional portraits. Laubin moved to London shortly after he completed the Bachelor of Architecture program at Cornell, and worked for Douglas Stephen and Partners, Architects and Civic Designers, and later Jeremy Dixon/BDP. Since 1986, Laubin has dedicated his career solely to painting. According to the selection committee, Laubin’s paintings “express ideas that embrace architecture and urbanism as a continuity, celebrating the commonality of cultures through time and place. His work reflects the complexity of both the structure of the painting and the composition of the buildings, with each building relating to the others and to its context. Through the thematic and formal relationships in his paintings, Laubin asks us questions about both how the world is and how it ought to be.”

’13

Gamolina Leads 19 Women Architects to Watch Architecture alumna Julia Gamolina (B.Arch. ’13) leads Architizer’s profiles of 19 Women Architects to Watch in 2019 for seeking constructive narratives and advocacy for women in architecture, rather than treating workplace inequality as an unsolvable mystery. Gamolina was

recognized for her article “Stop asking where all the female architects are; we’re right here,” published by the Architect’s Newspaper (December 2018). In it, Gamolina criticized a New York Times story that bemoaned the symptoms of workplace inequality but failed to do more than mention those breaking the status quo. “I no longer want to hear people asking, ‘Where are all the women architects?’” she argued. “Instead of asking ‘Where are these women?’ start writing about them and telling their unique stories.” A business developer at FXCollaborative, Gamolina

is the founder and editor of the platform Madame Architect, which launched at the same time that the #MeToo movement reached the profession. After more than 50 interviews, Madame Architect has evolved into a resource, a community, and a collective voice using the hashtag #WeAreHere. Also recognized in the group was Stella Betts, visiting critic at AAP NYC and cofounder of LEVENBETTS in New York City. LEVENBETTS designed AAP’s Frances Schloss Studio on the third floor of East Sibley Hall.

Jason R. Chandler (B.Arch. ’91), of Miami– based Chandler and Associates Architecture, was the lead on the Warehouse Complex, a pair of new structures that expands the warehouse typology by seamlessly integrating accessible access to dock-height warehouse space. The project earned a 2018 honor award of excellence for new work from the Florida Association of the AIA. Completed in 2016, the project design reflected the intention to refine a simple utilitarian building, solve the complexities of the building program within a restricted site, and create the opportunities for formal expression. Two new warehouse structures were composed of 45,000 square feet of dock-height warehouse space and 5,000 square feet of office space, with an open warehouse mezzanine. The project team included Chandler and Hermann Gonzalez. Previously, Chandler’s “hybrid” project Warehouse+Office, completed in 2011, earned an honor award of excellence from the Florida Association of the AIA in 2012. photo / Chandler and Associates Architecture

’00

Jeffrey Pelletier (B.Arch. ’00), principal architect and founder of the Seattle-based design firm Board and Vellum, led a team that designed a residential backyard reading retreat for Seattle clients. The upscale “shed” is a cottage providing an urban oasis that overlooks a landscaped yard with a fire pit, hot tub, and sauna. The small structure can function as a reading retreat for the homeowners, or as a private space for guests. photo / Andrew Giammarco Photography

Alumni Projects

Cornell AAP

’13

HPP Alumna Brings Indian Heritage to London Festival Last September in London, Kamalika Bose (M.A. HPP ’13) cocurated a special photography exhibition titled Bengal’s Durga, held at the National Theatre promenade as part of Totally Thames 2018. Hosted by the Government of West Bengal Department of Tourism in collaboration with the British Council as part of its 70th anniversary celebrations in India, the exhibition celebrated Bengali culture and the annual Durga Puja festivities in West Bengal. According to Bose, the exhibition provided insight into the creativity, artistic innovation, and cultural

celebration of Bengal’s riverine communities while celebrating an important part of Bengali culture and heritage. Durga Puja is a massive, 10-day Hindi festival held annually in India and Nepal. In contemporary West Bengal, many images represented in pandals—temporary structures housing idols—replicate Indian as well as foreign imagery and iconography. For example, some themed pandals for the goddess Durga re-create Indian forts and palaces, while others reproduce Mount Everest or Buckingham Palace. Cocurators Bose and Ali Pretty of Kinetika Design envision the exhibition as the start of a relationship between the U.K. and Bengali artists to create future events in Kolkata and London. Bose is an urban conservationist and heritage management professional who works in heritage-oriented planning, curation, education, and research. She is the

founder and director of Heritage Synergies India, an emerging practice committed to the stewardship, preservation, and management of built and cultural heritage, based in Mumbai. A Fulbright scholar while studying at AAP, Bose has done extensive research on India’s urban heritage, which forms the foundation of her conservation approach. She has assisted in conservation projects in New York City, Kolkata, and Rajasthan, India, and has authored three books. She is

Bengal’s Durga exhibition on the banks of the River Thames in London. photo / provided

also a visiting faculty at Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture in Mumbai, and was previously an assistant professor at the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology in Ahmedabad. Totally Thames is a celebration of diverse and accessible arts and culture hosted by Thames Festival Trust, held annually in September.

’04

Soria to Host Unspouse My House After graduating from Cornell, Orlando Soria (B.A./B.F.A. ’04) moved to Los Angeles and began a career in interior design. Soria spent 10 years in the interiors profession before pitching a new HGTV show titled Unspouse My House, a home makeover series based on his own experience with using design as a part of the postbreakup healing process. “In 2016, my boyfriend and I lived in a home I’d renovated for both of us, but I had to move out when we broke up,” says Soria. “In that terrible year, I noticed that one of the only things that made me feel better was designing my new home. It was the first time in a while that I designed a space without taking anyone else’s needs into account. So, the show really came out of a genuine desire for me to turn a personally difficult time into something that could help other people going through the same thing.”

Unspouse My House will premier this summer with each episode featuring a recently single homeowner who is struggling with the design ramifications of their breakup. Topics addressed include how to deal with splitting possessions, remnants that trigger painful memories, and how to use home makeover to imagine a fresh start in a playful way with the levity that Soria brings to what could otherwise be a daunting and heavy process. “In meeting these people, I become a kind of design therapist and confidant that

Silver Lake (Los Angeles) residence of screenwriter Jason Micallef, designed by Orlando Soria. photo / Zeke Ruelas

helps them to rebuild their lives,” Soria adds. “Yes, it’s a TV show—but it’s a way of using my design talents to help people going through an emotionally tumultuous time. Since we started filming, I’m realizing it’s a wonderful healing experience for everyone involved.” Soria also maintains a popular blog and social media presence, and is the author of Get It Together! (Prestel, 2018).

Spring 2019

FREESPACE AAP Alumni, Faculty, and Students Exhibit at the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture

AAP faculty and alumni—some in collaboration with AAP students—were exhibitors and curators in several of the 2018 Venice Biennale’s exhibition pavilions and related events.

MAIN EXHIBITION

Among the architectural designers and firms that appeared in the main exhibition at the Arsenale di Venezia was Weiss/ Manfredi, the firm of cofounders Marion Weiss and Michael A. Manfredi (M.Arch. ’80). The biennale’s theme of “Freespace” was interpreted in Lines of Movement, Weiss/Manfredi’s immersive installation, as an examination of new terms and conditions for design in the context of limited natural resources and the interconnected issues of climate change and social isolation.

U.S. PAVILION

Dimensions of Citizenship “Dimensions of Citizenship” was this year’s theme for the U.S. Pavilion, curated by Niall Atkinson (Ph.D. HAUD ’09), Ann Lok Liu (B.Arch. ’11), and Mimi Zeiger (B.Arch. ’94). The pavilion delved into the meaning of citizenship as a collection of rights and responsibilities, where legal, political, economic, and societal affiliations meet.

Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See a Line) Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See a Line) was an installation for the U.S. Pavilion courtyard created by lead artists Amanda Williams (B.Arch. ’97), a spring 2018 visiting critic in

architecture; and Andres L. Hernandez (B.Arch. ’97), in collaboration with Shani Crowe. The creators built on the dimensions of the citizenship theme by considering how race shapes notions of identity, shelter, and public space in historically African American communities.

Ports and Portals: Finding the Citizen Body Student work created for the spring 2018 undergraduate architecture option studio The Citizen Body, taught by Amanda Williams (B.Arch. ’97) and Visiting Critic Jonathan Stitelman, comprised the exhibition Ports and Portals: Finding the Citizen Body, curated by Assistant Professor Luben Dimcheff (B.Arch. ’99).

EGYPT PAVILION

One of four teams to exhibit within the Egypt Pavilion, Sara M. Anwar (B.Arch. ’02), Madiha Ahmad, and Ahmed Eltoutngi created Anatomy of Informality. Professor Andrea Simitch, the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and chair of the Department of Architecture, contributed editorial support. In line with the pavilion’s theme “Robabecciah: The Informal City,” the exhibition investigated acts of resilience and survival in informal spaces that have developed in Cairo to keep the city functioning.

PHILIPPINES PAVILION

Edson Cabalfin (Ph.D. HAUD ’11) curated the Philippines Pavilion, whose theme was “The City Who Had Two Navels.” The theme was inspired by National Artist of the Philippines for Literature Nick Joaquin’s 1961 novel, The Woman Who Had Two Navels, and confronted the tension between “the vicissitudes of the past and the challenges of constructing contemporary subjectivity.” The 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture is part of the 16th annual Biennale di Venezia, which showcases international works in art, architecture, cinema, dance, music, and theater.

Weiss/Manfredi’s exhibition Lines of Movement located in the Corderie of the Arsenale. photo / Weiss/Manfredi Architecture Landscape Urbanism

OVERLAY

Awards Grants Appointmen Competition In the News

Awards, Grants, Appointments, and Competitions ALUMNI

Christopher Battaglia (M.Arch. ’17) of Ball State University was named a university design research fellow for Exhibit Columbus 2018–19. Battaglia also won the Design Innovation Fellowship position at Ball State University.

Artist and architect Alejandro Borges’s (M.Arch. ’94) drawing Invited was awarded finalist in the 2018 AIA Dallas Ken Roberts Memorial Delineation Competition. Ben Coleman (M.R.P. ’17), a planner for Matanuska-Susitna Borough, Alaska, was awarded the Emerging Planner of the Year by the American Planning Association Alaska Chapter.

Kimberly Dowdell (B.Arch. ’06) was named one of Crain’s Detroit “40 under 40” for her neighborhood revitalization work in the city.

Wylie Goodman (M.R.P. ’17) secured a grant from New Jersey Enterprise Community Partners for her project Activating Vacant Storefronts, in cooperation with the Greater Ridgewood Youth Council Myrtle Avenue Business Improvement District, in Queens.

The alumni team led by Robert Goodwin (B.Arch. ’84), of Perkins+Will’s New York City studio; and David J. Lewis (M.A. HAUD ’92), principal at Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis Architects, New York City; along with Trowbridge Wolf Michaels Landscape Architects, received a merit award in architecture in the AIA New York 2018 Design Awards for the Upson Hall redesign completed in fall 2017. Jen Grosso (B.Arch. ’13) was selected this fall by Alloy Development as senior project manager to lead the design and architecture team for 80 Flatbush, a large mixed-use project in downtown Brooklyn. Handel Architects, the firm of Gary Handel (B.Arch. ’78) and Blake Middleton (B.Arch. ’78, M.Arch. ’81), received the American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum International Museum/ The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies for The House at Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island. The House also won the Project of the Year for the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Homes Award. Eric Höweler (B.Arch. ’94, M.Arch. ’96) of Höweler + Yoon Architecture was appointed a commissioner to the Boston Civic Design Commission in December 2018. Michael Jefferson (M.Arch. ’12) and Noah Ives (M.Arch. ’12) were on two separate teams that were winners in the Sukkah x Detroit international design competition. Temporary structures commemorating the Jewish holiday of Sukkot were exhibited in downtown Detroit’s Capitol Park in September 2018. Sam Jury (M.F.A. ’98) was awarded the UK’s prestigious Arts and Humanities Research Council 2018 Research in Film Award for her film To Be Here.

Cornell AAP

The award was announced in November at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts London.

Rania Matar (B.Arch. ’87) received a Guggenheim fellowship for photography in April. Matar’s work explores issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood.

The Wallace Center at Winrock International selected Luis Nieves-Ruiz (M.R.P. ’02) as a Regional Food Economies Fellow. He currently serves as economic development manager for the East Central Florida Regional Planning Council in Orlando. Hannah Levy (B.F.A. ’13) was listed in Forbes’s Art and Style “30 under 30,” notably for the vegetable-inspired sculpture she has exhibited internationally.

Hans (B.Arch. ’80) and Roger ’78 Strauch made a gift of $250,000 to enable the Department of Architecture to continue offering studios focused on sustainable design led by prominent visiting faculty. This gift supplements the endowed fund the Strauchs established in 2013 with a gift of $750,000.

In January, Eddie Valero (B.S. URS ’04) began a term as supervisor, District Four, on the County Board of Supervisors of Tulare County, California. FACULTY

Associate Professor Esra Akcan, architecture, was named a research fellow for 2019 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal for her project Intertwined Histories of Seven Other Wonders. Also, Akcan and Peter Christensen of the University of Rochester received a $15,000 grant from the Central New York Humanities Corridor for the working group, New Approaches to Scholarship and Pedagogy in Ottoman and Turkish Architecture. In January, Visiting Critic Sarosh Anklesaria, architecture, was awarded a 2019 Richard Rogers Fellowship by Harvard GSD and a 2019 Art Omi Architecture Residency.

Timur Dogan, assistant professor in architecture, received a $26,000 grant from the David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future to create a living Campus Building Energy Model Repository using the Cornell campus as a test case to prove that the technology is fit to scale and can be applied to other large building portfolios or urban areas. Architecture’s Assistant Professor Samia Henni’s book, Architecture of Counterrevolution (GTA Verlag, 2017), received two awards from the Festival International du Livre d’Art et du Film (FILAF) 2018—the Silver FILAF book award and the Theory of Art book award. Architecture assistant professors Leslie Lok and Sasa Zivkovic won the Folly/Function 2018 competition sponsored by the Architectural League of New York and Socrates Sculpture Park. Their entry, RRRolling Stones, was on display from July through December 2018. Architecture’s Assistant Professor of the Practice Martin Miller and Mo Zheng,

coprincipals of New York City and Beijingbased Antistatics Architecture Design, took first place in Winter Stations, an annual international design competition, for Pussy Hut, an oval pavilion fabricated in the style of the pink pussy hats made famous during the Women’s March in January 2017.

Jennifer Minner, assistant professor in CRP, was appointed to the National Conference Committee of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, as well as track cochair of Analytical Methods and Computer Applications. In addition, she was named a Faculty Fellow of Engaged Scholarship by Engaged Cornell.

Assistant Professor Linda Shi, CRP, received a $13,430 grant from Cornell University’s David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future in support of her study of the relationship between urban centers and rural hinterlands in efforts to promote urban resilience; and an Engaged Opportunity Grant to support a spring workshop class titled Responding to Local Fiscal Vulnerability to Climate Change. She is also the coprincipal investigator, along with Jennifer Minner, assistant professor in CRP, on the grant proposal Surging Seas, Rising Fiscal Stress: A Study of U.S. Fiscal Vulnerability and Policy Responses to Climate Change, which received a $5,000 grant from the Institute for the Social Sciences. Kay WalkingStick, professor emerita in the Department of Art, was a recipient of the 2018 Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award from the New York Foundation for the Arts. STUDENTS

In recognition of the excellence in education their daughter is receiving, the parents of Hallie Black (B.Arch. ’19) created a scholarship at AAP to be awarded in the fall, with a preference for first-generation students.

Yoonseo Cha’s (B.Arch. ’19) Memory Wall, created for a Cornell in Rome class taught by visiting architecture critic Davide Marchetti in 2016, was selected to be part of the Million Islands City: KIA Convention and Exhibition 2018, held at the Jeju Museum of Art, Korea, in October. In December, Oonagh Davis (B.Arch. ’20) received the $2,000 Weiss/Manfredi scholarship award from the Center for Architecture at the Heritage Ball in New York City. The award was presented on behalf of 2018 Heritage Ball President’s Award honoree Weiss/Manfredi, the firm cofounded by Michael Manfredi (M.Arch. ’80). In December, Zachary Decker (M.R.P. ’20), Sara Trigoboff (M.R.P. ’19), and Ethan Wissler (M.R.P. ’20) received a cash prize of $2,500 for fourth place in the Colvin Case Study Challenge, a national intercollegiate real estate case study competition. Linqi Dong (B.Arch. ’19) received the bronze medal in the Creative Conscience 2018 Competition’s architecture/interiors category, for her proposal Spiritual Patchwork located at Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, one of the most important industrial waterways in the U.S. for more than 150 years.

Spring 2019

Yue (Maria) Ma (M.Arch. ’18) received a Highly Commended award in the 2018 Architecture Drawing Prize competition for work she created in the spring 2018 option studio Fly on the Wall, taught by visiting critics Derek Dellekamp, Rozana Montiel, and Erin Pellegrino (B.Arch. ’14). Representing the U.S., Baker Program in Real Estate student Daniel Manichello (M.R.P. ’19) was among 11 students from Australia, Germany, Italy, Canada, and the U.S. honored with a Career Award from InnoTrans, an international trade fair focused on the rail transport industry.

nts ns

In October, the Cornell National Organization of Minority Architects Students (NOMAS) team placed in the top six and received a Jurors Choice award in the student competition at the 46th Annual NOMA Conference in Chicago, making this Cornell’s best showing in three years.

Maggie O’Keefe (B.F.A. ’19) attended the highly competitive Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution program for two months during the summer. O’Keefe focused specifically on her practice of drawing and painting. A photograph by Vaidehi Reddy (B.F.A. ’22) took third place in the Cornell Institute for Healthy Futures photography contest in September. Cornelius Tulloch (B.Arch. ’21) received an Engaged Opportunity Grant for student leadership for the fall 2018 edition of student-run Thread Magazine.

AAP master’s and doctoral students received travel grants to support research in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Recipients include Olivia Heckendorf (M.A. HPP ’19), Vladislav Markov (M.F.A. ’19), Hannah Miller (M.A. HPP ’19), Sophia Starling (M.F.A. ’19), and Fauzul Sutikno (Ph.D. CRP ’22).

Independent study projects by students working with architecture faculty at the Cornell Robotic Construction Lab won first and third place in the architectural division of the 2018 Composites Challenge. The first-place student team included Jingjing Liu (B.Arch. ’21), Jing Wei (William) Qian (B.Arch. ’19), Xiaohang (Gloria) Yan (B.Arch. ’20), Jingxin Yang (B.Arch. ’21), and Yuheng (Amber) Zhu (B.Arch. ’20). Third place went to Karolina Piorko (B.Arch. ’21), Song Ren (B.Arch. ’19), and Veronika Varga (B.Arch. ’21). The student teams worked under the direction of Assistant Professor Sasa Zivkovic, with teaching associates Christopher Battaglia (M.Arch. ’17) and Brian Havener (M.Arch. ’18).

Articles and Books ALUMNI

Glen Coben (B.Arch. ’86), An Architect’s Cookbook (Oro Editions, 2018)

Peter Choi (B.Arch. ’90), Settlers of Seoul podcast, November 29, 2019 Imani Day (B.Arch. ’11), “Let’s Get Real about Diversity,” ARCHITECT magazine, July 10, 2018 Kimberly Dowdell (B.Arch. ’06), “The Complexion of Legacy in Architecture,” ARCHITECT magazine, January 8, 2019 Nic Goldsmith (B.Arch. ’74), Mass to Membrane (Oro Editions, 2018) Wylie Goodman (M.R.P. ’17), quoted in a January press release by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio for her role as the cochair of the Queens Solid Waste Advisory Board Organizing Committee in support of new legislation banning Styrofoam Pat Lipsky (B.F.A. ’63), “Soutine Is the Kafka of Painting,” Tablet magazine, January 11, 2019 Clint McManus (M.R.P. ’15) and Katelin Olson (M.A. HPP ’09, Ph.D. HPP ’18), covered in “Cornell, Community Partners Help Drive Buffalo’s Revival,” Cornell Chronicle, December 5, 2018 Joseph Podlesnik (M.F.A. ’92), The Trees (self-published photo book, January 2019) Charles Steiner (B.F.A. ’73), Steiner’s studio featured in “A View from the Easel,” Hyperallergic, September 28, 2018 Mei-Lan Tan (B.Arch. ’16) and Victor Lefebvre, featured in Dwell magazine, September 14, 2018 FACULTY

Associate Professor Esra Akcan, architecture: Book launch for Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship, and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg by IBA-1984/87 in Munich, Berlin, New York City, Ithaca, Boston, Hong Kong, and Ankara “How Does Architecture Heal? AKM as Palimpsest and Ghost,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 118(1): 81–94 Blogposts: “What Has Architectural History Done about Recent Immigration Policies?,” Society of Architectural Historians; “Open Architecture,” TRAFO Blog for Transregional Research

Jeffrey Chusid, associate professor and chair of CRP, profile titled “Jeffrey Chusid Explores the Fate of Structures in Times of Change,” Ezra magazine, October 2018 Assistant Professor Tao DuFour, architecture, “Fabricating Wilderness,” in The Routledge Research Companion to Landscape Architecture (Routledge, 2018) Associate Professor of the Practice George Frantz, CRP, “Stormwater Management Park in Your Future?,” The Field, American Society of Landscape Architects Blog, November 2018 Visiting Associate Professor Bill Gaskins, art, interviewed Andrew Moisey, author of the photo book Boys to Men: A Conversation on Fraternity Culture and Toxic Masculinity, in Exposure magazine on Medium, November 29, 2018 Associate Professor Neema Kudva, CRP, “Building Resilience,” College of Arts and Sciences’ What Makes Us Human? podcast. In the same series, associate professor in CRP Stephan Schmidt asked if environmental issues are urban problems and if cities can have a positive impact on climate change. D. Medina Lasansky, Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory, architecture, Hidden Histories: The Alternative Guide to Florence and Tuscany, the first volume in the Critical Tuscan Studies series (University of Florence, DIDA Press, 2018) Assistant professors of architecture Leslie Lok and Sasa Zivkovic’s firm HANNAH, along with Anna Lui (B.Arch. ’11), featured in the “Next progressives” section, ARCHITECT magazine, December 10, 2018, and January 3, 2019, respectively CRP assistant professor Jennifer Minner, “Tours of Critical Geography and Public Deliberation: Applied Social Sciences as Guide,” in Human-Centered Built Heritage Conservation: Theory and Evidence-Based Practice (Routledge, 2018)

Articles Books

Department of Art chair and associate professor Michael Ashkin, book launch for Horizont (TIS Books, 2019) in Paris; Horizont also reviewed in American Suburb X in February. The book features photographs originally exhibited at AAP in the spring 2018 semester. Associate Professor Thomas J. Campanella, CRP, “Watering New York’s Transit Deserts,” the New York Times, August 13, 2018

Caroline O’Donnell, Edgar A. Tafel Professor and M.Arch. program director, and Susan Rodriguez (B.Arch. ’81), a partner at Ennead Architects, profiled in 50 Contemporary Women Artists: Groundbreaking Contemporary Art from 1960 to Now (Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., October 2018), coedited by Heather Zises ’98 and John Gosslee Associate professor and director of graduate studies Carl Ostendarp, art, had work featured in The Word Is Art, by Michael Petry (Thames and Hudson, 2018) Associate Professor Maria Park, art, and Branden Hookway, visiting assistant

In the News

professor in architecture, featured in the spring 2018 issue of Interface Critique for work based on the exhibition titled Training Setting shown at AAP in fall 2017

Exhibitio Present Lecture

Assistant Professor Linda Shi, CRP, quoted in “Climate Change Could Sink Amazon’s New York Headquarters,” New Republic, November 16, 2018 Andrea Simitch, the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and chair of the Department of Architecture: Interviewed by Julia Gamolina (B.Arch. ’13) in Madame Architect, October 5, 2018 The Language of Architecture, coauthored with Associate Professor Val Warke, was included in ArchDaily’s feature titled “116 Best Architecture Books for Architects and Students,” September 11, 2018

Cornell AAP

Exhibitions, Presentations, and Lectures

ALUMNI

Nandini Bagla Chirimar (B.F.A. ’90): Of Herbariums, Hortoriums and Home, exhibition at Gallery Espace, New Delhi, India, December 2018; and the Gallery Espace booth and Ganges Gallery booth at India Art Fair, New Delhi, December 2018 Threads: Printmaking Meets Needle, group exhibition, Manhattan Graphics Center, New York City, February 2019 The Unity of Everything, Art Times Two the Gallery at Princeton Brain and Spine, Princeton, September 2018

Sophia Balagamwala (M.F.A. ’14), Soft Bodies, group exhibition curator, IVS Gallery in Karachi, Pakistan, August 10–18, 2018

CRP’s Professor Mildred Warner: “Leviathan or Public Steward? Evidence on Local Government Taxing Behavior from New York State,” coauthored with Austin Aldag (Ph.D. CRP ’25) and Yunji Kim (Ph.D. CRP ’17), Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 2018 “Shrinking Local Autonomy: Corporate Coalitions and the Subnational State,” with Kim, in Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 11(3): 427–41 “Starving Counties, Squeezing Cities: Tax and Expenditure Limits in the US,” with Kim, Christine Wen, and doctoral candidate and visiting lecturer Yuanshuo Xu (M.R.P. ’13), in Journal of Economic Policy Reform, 2018, 1–19

Jeremy Bilotti (B.Arch. ’18), Bennett Norman ’18, and David Rosenwasser (B.Arch. ’18), “ROBOSENSE 2.0: Robotic Sensing and Architectural Ceramic Fabrication,” presentation at ACADIA annual conference, Mexico City, October 2018

Professor Mary Woods, architecture, book launch for softcover edition of Women Architects in India: Histories of Practice in Mumbai and Delhi (Routledge, 2018), AAP NYC, November 2018

Maria Calandra (M.F.A. ’06), FURTHER, group exhibition, George Gallery, Brooklyn, February 10–March 10, 2019

STUDENTS

Carolyn Gimbal (M.A. HPP ’19), featured in an online interview produced by the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, August 2018

cles ks

History of architecture and urban development Ph.D. candidate Gökhan Kodalak, “Spinoza, Heterarchical Ontology, and Affective Architecture,” in Spinoza’s Philosophy of Ratio, edited by Beth Lord (Edinburgh University Press, 2018)

Erik den Breejan (M.F.A. ’06), Peach Pimento Pizza Plum, Peanut Pumpkin Bubble Gum, P.S. 24, Queens, part of the Collection of the New York City Department of Education, Public Art for Public Schools, October 2018 Leah Thomason Bromberg (B.F.A. ’08), MATERSBIER, solo exhibition, Stables in Exile, London, October 13– November 10, 2018

Brian Dunn (M.F.A. ’13), new.now, group exhibition, Hamiltonian Gallery, Washington, DC, September–October 2018 Paula Elliott (M.F.A. ’75), [containing] great space, Hampden Gallery, University of Massachusetts–Amherst, October 21– November 15, 2018 Charisse Foo (B.Arch. ’18), artist talk, GreenspaceNYC, a pop-up gallery, October 5–7, 2018

and Spektrum/at art science community in Berlin, July 2018

Rebecca Rutstein (B.F.A. ’93), Out of the Darkness: Light in the Depths of the Sea of Cortez, solo exhibition, Georgia Museum of Art, November 1, 2018–October 27, 2019 Clayton Skidmore (M.F.A. ’17), Plant Sale, solo exhibition, Life Lessons Garage, Far Rockaway, New York, July 14–29, 2018

Charles Steiner (B.F.A. ’73): Dep(art)ing Passengers, solo exhibition, Fort Smith Regional Airport, Fort Smith, Arkansas, September 2018–January 2019 Group faculty exhibition, University of Arkansas Department of Art and Graphic Design, Fort Smith, Arkansas, October 2018

Jim Zver (M.F.A. ’69): (im)material, group show, Norco College, Norco, California, November 2018 Holga photograph from the Coronado Series, L.A. Artcore’s Third Annual Photographic Competition and Exhibition, Artcore Brewery Annex, Los Angeles, February 2019 FACULTY AND STAFF

Associate professor in architecture Esra Akcan: Respondent to two Cornell symposia, “Alexander Kluge: New Perspectives on Creative Arts and Critical Practice” and “Global Grand Challenges” As director of Cornell Institute for European Studies at the Einaudi Center, organized several lectures and moderated panels on campus

Department of Art associate professors Roberto Bertoia and Gregory Page, Heightened Awareness, exhibition at Main Street Arts, Clifton Springs, New York, July 7–August 17, 2018 Associate Professor Tao DuFour, B.Arch. thesis project, A Feira (Market) in the Sertão—Canudos, Brazil, displayed in Archive and Artifact: The Virtual and the Physical, exhibition at DuFour’s alma mater The Cooper Union, October 23– December 1, 2018 AAP Office of Communications staff members Edith Fikes and Bill Staffeld, group show Book/mark, Tjaden Hall, February 2019

Vladislav Markov’s (M.F.A. ’19) work included in summer group show at M23 Projects in Brooklyn, reviewed in Artforum, November 2018

Peter D. Gerakaris (B.F.A. ’03): Not Only Paper, group exhibition, Asia Hundred Million Gallery in Taipei, Taiwan, January 11–February 17, 2019 Transplants: Greek Diaspora Artists, group exhibition, John Jay College’s Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, May 2– June 28, 2018

Kelechi Mpamaugo (B.F.A. ’20), launched her own creative agency this fall, @Kelechi.ca, profiled in the Cornell Daily Sun, August 22, 2018

Jen Grosso (B.Arch. ’13), “A Convergence at the Confluence of Power, Identity, and Design,” panelist at Harvard GSD hosted by Women in Design, November 2018

Tommy Musca (B.Arch. ’19), “New Talent 2018: Nonprofit LA-Más Is Revitalizing Los Angeles’s Overlooked Corners,” Metropolis magazine, July 11, 2018

Jenn Houle (M.F.A. ’15), Meteors Are Space Eggs, solo exhibition, University of Massachusetts–Amherst, Fine Arts Center, Hampden Gallery, Amherst, Massachusetts, September 27–October 11. The exhibition was previewed in “Start Making Sense,” Artscope, September 5, 2018

Associate Professor of the Practice George Frantz, CRP: “Water Resource Protection in Small Cities and Rural Areas, American Techniques and Lessons for China,” presentation at International City Infrastructure Management Conference, Hangzhou, China, September 2018 “Is Your Zoning Keeping Up with the Agricultural Evolution?” presentation at American Farmland Trust Forum, held in Gouverneur, New York, November 2018 With Assistant Professor Jennifer Minner, CRP, organized the visit to Cornell by Ling Wang, vice director of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, November 2018

Brad Nathanson (B.Arch. ’18), Amplified Bricks, performance exhibition, Cesis Art Festival in Latvia, July 22–August 26;

The late Bonnie MacDougall, professor emerita in architecture, Depicting the Sri Lankan Vernacular, an online collection

Shainee Moodie (B.S. URS ’20), featured in “The ‘First-Gen’ Experience at Cornell,” Cornell Chronicle, October 30, 2018

ons tations es 47

of images published by the Cornell University Library in July

Assistant professor of the practice in art Joanna Malinowska, Body of Evidence, group show, Peninsula Art Space, Brooklyn, September 30–December 2, 2018

Architecture assistant professor Aleksandr Mergold, EXIT Architecture: Speculations for the Hereafter, group exhibition, Art Omi, Ghent, New York, January 12–March 3, 2019

Architecture assistant professor of the practice Martin Miller, assistant professor of architecture Sasa Zivkovic, and AAP graduate Christopher Battaglia (M.Arch. ’17), “Sub-Additive 3D Printing of Optimized Double Curved Concrete Lattice Thin Shell Structures,” presentation and workshop at 2018 ROB-ARCH conference at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, September 2018

Assistant Professor Jennifer Minner, CRP: “Navigating Challenges and Building Infrastructure to Support Community Engaged Partnerships,” roundtable with CRP faculty John Forester, George Frantz, and others, 2018 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning conference, October 2018 “Equitable Reinvestment and Community Preservation: Mapping Progress in Buffalo, New York,” presentation at Cultural and Historic Preservation Conference, Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island, October 2018 “Learning from Time Spent on Monuments,” panel presentation at the “Place, Memory, and the Public Monument” symposium at Cornell, November 2018 Architecture’s Edgar A. Tafel Professor Caroline O’Donnell and Assistant Professor of the Practice Martin Miller, Evitim, installation at Architecture Fields at Art Omi, in Ghent, New York, October 2018 Associate Professor Carl Ostendarp, art: Heads Roll, group exhibition curated by Paul Morrison at Graves Gallery, Sheffield, United Kingdom, August 11– November 24, 2018 Scorpio Rising, group exhibition curated by Carl D’Alvia at Best Western, Ridgewood, New York, November 2–25, 2018 OQBO/raum für Bild wort ton Oqbo— paperfile on tour, group exhibition, Positions Berlin Art Fair, Berlin, Germany, September 29–30, 2018

Associate Professor Maria Park, art, Light Years, group exhibition, Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York City, July 5–August 17, 2018 Arthur L. and Isabel B. Weisenberger Professor in Architecture Jenny Sabin: “Lumen,” presentation with Dillon Pranger (M.Arch. ’15); Clayton Binkley and Kristen Strobel, both structural engineers at Arup; and Jingyang (Leo) Liu (M.Arch. ’15, M.S. ’18) at the ACADIA annual conference, Mexico City, October 2018 Matter Design Computation: Projects 2012–2018, solo exhibition, Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, Stony Brook University, New York, October 1, 2018– February 8, 2019

Spring 2019 Internships

Professor Mildred Warner, CRP: “What Can City Managers Do? A Toolbox,” presentation with Austin Aldag (Ph.D. CRP ’25), Mark Cassidy (M.R.P. ’19), Alfie Rayner (B.S. URS ’20), and Natassia Bravo Arredondo (M.R.P. ’19), International City County Management Association, Baltimore, September 2018 “Flowing Values: Cost Recovery, Conservation, and Social Equity in U.S. Drinking Water Provision,” presentation at Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning annual conference in Buffalo, October 2018

Höweler + Yoon, the firm of Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of AAP J. Meejin Yoon (B.Arch. ’95) and Eric Höweler (B.Arch. ’94, M.Arch. ’96); and FXCollaborative, the firm of Dan Kaplan (B.Arch. ’84), work included in The Road Ahead: Reimagining Mobility, exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York City, December 14, 2018–March 31, 2019 Architecture’s assistant professors Sasa Zivkovic and Leslie Lok, Corbel Cabin: 3D Printed Concrete Building, exhibition at ACADIA annual conference, Mexico City, October 2018 STUDENTS

Oonagh Davis (B.Arch. ’20), Acceleration vs. Deliberation, exhibition at Cornell’s new Flower-Sprecher Veterinary Library, December 2018

Evan McDowell (B.Arch. ’19) was a summer intern for Cornell’s Office of the University Architect where he worked on a preschematic design for future campus building projects and new visitor information booths. He was the first student intern since the office was reestablished last year. In a summer internship at Urban Future Lab in Texas, Isaiah Devin Murray (B.S. URS ’20), pictured above at left, worked on a research project titled Methods of Hybrid Community Engagement for Data Collection on the Southside of San Antonio, TX, a U.S./ Mexico border region.

CRP Ph.D. students Austin Aldag, Jared Enriquez, Shoshana Goldstein, Lu Liao, Andrea Restrepo-Mieth, Seema Singh, Nidhi Subramanyam, Ryan Thomas, and Yuanshuo Xu led sessions at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning annual conference, Buffalo, October 2018 Skye Hart (M.R.P. ’19), Rhea Lopes (M.R.P. ’19), and Assistant Professor Linda Shi attended the 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Katowice, Poland, December 2018 Adam Klier (B.S. URS ’19) was one of three Cornell student veteran leaders who attended the Student Veterans of America Leadership Institute conference, Washington, DC, September 2018 Juan Lopez Jr. (B.Arch. ’23) and his father, Juan Lopez Sr., featured on an episode of the cable TV series Bake It Like Buddy, September 22, 2018 Cornelius Tulloch (B.Arch. ’21), photography included in Miami Art Week at the 14th annual Pulse Contemporary Art Fair, December 6–9, 2018 Christina Welzer (B.F.A. ’19), Night Vision, large projection installation of an American flag made entirely from dollar bills, facing Tjaden Hall, November 2–9, 2018

Share your news with us! aap.cornell.edu/ submit-news

AAP Connect cultivates and leverages relationships between AAP students, alumni, and employers through networking, programming, and mentoring. Through portfolio development and connections with quality internships, jobs, and career opportunities, AAP Connect helps students and recent graduates achieve their career goals. To get involved, please contact Scott Scheible, associate director, (607) 254-3583, sms473@cornell.edu.

Portfolio Development Day Fourth- and fifth-year B.Arch. students studying at AAP NYC in the fall had the opportunity to get one-onone feedback on their portfolios from practicing architects. Organized by AAP Connect and hosted by Blake Middleton (B.Arch. ’78, M.Arch. ’81) at Handel Architects, the third annual Portfolio Development

Day combined presentations, networking, and individual portfolio reviews to help the students prepare for their upcoming job search. Participating alumni included Stephen Moser (B.Arch. ’81) and Helene Lee (B.Arch. ’16), Stephen Moser Architect; Billy Erhard (B.Arch. ’08), Edward (Eddie) Yujoong Kim (B.Arch. ’09), and Melanie Weismiller (B.Arch. ’13), Ennead Architects; Mikhail Grinwald (B.Arch. ’13),

Susan T. Rodriguez Architecture Design; Daniel Toretsky (B.Arch. ’16) and Shuping Liu (B.Arch. ’14), SHoP; Aaron Schwarz (B.Arch. ’80), Plan A; Donny Silberman (B.Arch. ’13) and Natalie Pierro (B.Arch. ’09), RAMSA; Jerri Smith (M.Arch. ’81), KPF; and Jessica Levine (M.Arch. ’13), Alfred To (M.Arch.II ’15), Eric Suntup (B.Arch. ’11), and Maria Stanciu (B.Arch. ’15) of Handel Architects.

Voices

Cornell AAP

VOICES

Advice from a Formerly Lonely College Student By Emery Bergmann (B.F.A. ’21) Excerpted from a piece that originally appeared in the “Family” section of the New York Times on October 9, 2018. Last fall, I made a viral video about having trouble making friends. Here’s what I’ve learned. Being known as “the girl with no friends” wasn’t my favorite part about having made a video that went viral— but you take what you can get. About a year ago, as a college freshman at Cornell, I was assigned a short video project for my Intro to Digital Media class. I decided to focus on my disappointment with the early weeks of college: How I couldn’t get past superficial conversation; how I couldn’t seem to enjoy parties, feel comfortable on campus, or just meet people who I wanted to spend more time around. I felt so lost and beyond confused. I had been looking forward to college for years. I started studying for standardized tests in 10th [grade], hammering out extracurricular activities and AP courses all through 11th, and spent senior year typing applications till my fingers practically bled. I got into a great school, pleasing myself and my family. This was not the payoff I expected. The worst part was that I felt as if I were the only one who was this lonely. I’d see all these freshmen walk in packs—just massive groups of friends already formed in the first two weeks of school. I couldn’t muster the courage to ask people to get lunch. It was so frustrating. I immediately turned on myself—criticized and blamed myself for being weird and unapproachable. I spent a ton of time on social media, constantly checking in on my high school friends and seeing how they were getting along at their colleges. They’d post more and text me less. I really tried to put myself out there, but the more people I met, the more defeated I felt. Still from My College Transition.

I wasn’t interested in forging fake relationships out of necessity, I wanted genuine friendships that I could treasure. Why couldn’t I find them in my first month on campus? I poured my loneliness into the fourand-a-half-minute film I made, called My College Transition. I posted it on YouTube expecting only my professor and a couple friends to see it. It now has over 275,000 views and hundreds of comments. I had students from all over the country reach out to me and express their experiences, thanking me for making them feel less alone. Administrators from various universities wrote to me asking for permission to show the video to their freshman class. I spoke on panels, gave tons of interviews, and won an award at a film festival. It was overwhelming in the most beautiful way and was further proof that I wasn’t alone in my experience. It also showed how necessary it was for people to be open about isolation on college campuses. Now, a year after making the film, I’ve settled in to college a lot better. But I see the new batch of freshmen around me and imagine many of them are going through the same transition. Here’s what I know now that I wish I could have told my younger self. You can’t clone your high school friends The notion that my college friends should be stand-ins for my close relationships from home: impossible.

One of the great things about going away to college is the chance to meet people who are not the same. I learned to cherish each relationship for its uniqueness, for the different perspective and ideas it brought into my life. Social media is not reality I had to minimize my time on social media. It became a platform for comparison. I evaluated every picture my friends posted, determining whether their college looked like more fun than mine, if they had made more friends than I had. It was comforting when old friends reached out to me to say that they related to the video. Many of them were people I thought were having a fantastic time at school. I taught myself that everyone’s college experience is different, and slowly, I started to embrace the uniqueness of my own. Give yourself time to adjust Transitions are always hard—regardless of your age. But the social expectations around college put overwhelming pressure on students to fit seamlessly into their campus, without truly acknowledging the difficulty of uprooting your life and starting fresh. The hardest thing to tell struggling freshmen is that acclimation takes time—and “thriving” even longer. Making friends is an active process, and all the preconceived ideas college students arrive with can make for a defeating experience. Understand that your loneliness is not failure, and that you are far from being alone in this feeling. Open your mind and take experiences as they come. You’re going to find your people.

Learn more about Emery Bergmann See My College Transition at aap.cornell.edu/ people/emery-bergmann

r2_190217_COVER.indd 2

Take a virtual tour aap.cornell.edu/ art-faculty-johnsonmuseum

4/16/19 1:57 PM

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

Non-Profit Org. US Postage PAID Syracuse NY Permit No 999

ARCHITECTURE ART PLANNING SPRING 2019

In High Demand 06 Brooklyn Cruise Terminal 17 An Undeniable Voice 37 Freespace 41