Next New York

Edited by Mona El Khafif and Seth McDowell

Over the last 500 years, a range of innovative, responsive, and pragmatic civic actions have helped to generate, define, and maintain New York City’s global significance. From early on much of these actions were responses to population density and the accompanying challenges for health and well-being. Approaching its next growth cycle, New York is again amid important urban transformations that demand new urban and architectural models that allow for an open city to balance gentrification, and to address a lack of public spaces, social infrastructure, and affordable housing. These challenges and their architectural and urban implications are the focus of Next New York.

The book captures the city’s current momentum through the lens of three important urban actions: sharing, connecting, and partnering. Through 10 essays from scholars and practitioners working on pressing urban issues, a photographic essay portraying New York during COVID-19, and more than 35 design projects from graduate studios at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture, Next New York reflects, comments, and speculates on New York City’s capacity to bring about new conceptions of city-making and collective cohabitation through architecture.

Editors

Mona El Khafif is an associate professor at UVA School of Architecture and Principal of SCALESHIFT a design research-based practice located in Toronto and Virginia. Her research operates at multiple scales, examining the interdisciplinary aspects of urban design, creative placemaking, urban prototyping, and strategies for the smart city.

Seth McDowell is an associate professor at UVA School of Architecture and is a co-founding partner of mcdowellespinosa architects located in Virginia and New York. His work, which explores architecture, art, and urban design as an artifact of material and construction experimentation.

Other contributors

Sharon Haar

Matthew Jull

Edward Mitchell

Carrie Moore

SHoP Architects

Kathy Velikov and Geoffrey Thün

Thomas Woltz

ISBN 978-1-957183-07-7

Title: Next New York

Size: 6.75” x 9.5” Portrait

Pages: 360pp

Binding: Softbound with flaps

Publication Date: Fall 2022

ISBN: 978-1-957183-07-7

Price: $35.00

World Rights: Available

53500

Liquid Knowledge: Spaces for Pedagogy in the Speculative City

Sharon Haar

Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. It is actively moving in all the currents of society itself.

—John Dewey, “The School and Social Progress”

In 1937 the University of Pittsburgh dedicated one of the most iconic college campuses in the United States, the forty-two-story Cathedral of Learning designed by Charles Klauder, one of the country’s leading collegiate architects in the period before World War II. Standing atop a hill in the center of Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood, the building celebrates pedagogy, the attainment of knowledge, the capacities of modern building technology, and a land-poor university’s ambitions (figure 1). If, thanks to Rem Koolhaas, New York’s Downtown Athletic Club (Starrett and Van Vleck, 1930) is the better-known hybrid building, the Cathedral is a purer skyscraper and, perhaps, contains the more compelling, publicly available interior. Its mix of programs includes a soaring commons space built of load-bearing stone, thirty-one “nationality rooms” designed in conversation with local ethnic communities, (originally) the main stacks of the university library, a theater, a food court, lounges, labs, more than twenty floors of classrooms and lecture halls, and departmental and faculty offices, all made possible by steel-frame construction, elevators, and electric lighting, if not central air conditioning (figure 2). It is the predecessor of contemporary educational buildings such as Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center for the Columbia University Medical Center in New York. There is one important difference: the latter’s inversion of the logic of the Gothic revival uniform—concealing the precocious, complex body—in favor of an architecture of programmatic over-articulation—letting it all hang out. Despite being buildings for higher education, the Cathedral of Learning and the Vagelos Education Center set the stage for thinking about the place and space of public education in the city. First, they challenge the notion that education is largely a project of horizontality, the section somehow anathema to both physical and educational

Courtyard Unleashed

Courtyard Unleashed pays tribute to the historic fabric of the surrounding neighborhood and experiments with the familiar typology of the courtyard through a massing strategy based around three interlocking courtyards. The largest of the three courtyards spans horizontally across the full width of the site, promoting neighborhood pedestrian connections, and offering a large outdoor space which can be shared between the school and the neighborhood. The school’s inhabitable rooftop not only generates additional open space, but also provides residential access to two vertically-oriented courtyards containing interior common areas, green spaces, and circulation connections between the other courtyards, sidewalks, and upper-level gardens.