AAP News 06

News06 Spring2009

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As many of you know, I spent last semester shuttling between New York City and Ithaca, completing my responsibilities at the New School while transitioning to the deanship at AAP.

One of the (few) advantages of this arrangement was that it allowed me to represent the College in the fall, during a period of unprecedented challenge. Cornell University, like many institutions of higher learning, is grappling with significant decreases in its endowment revenue, and the College had to begin a serious review of its operations and budget.

My experience over these recent months brings a certain Dickensian phrase to mind: The economic climate makes this the worst of times in recent history, not just for the institution, but also for many of our students and their families, domestic and international alike. Yet this urgency has produced remarkable unity and sense of purpose among the university leadership; Cornell is exemplary among American universities in reaffirming its commitment to the core principles of student access and academic excellence. In November Cornell announced that it will eliminate parental contribution for family incomes below $60,000 and further reduce student loans with the goal of having as many students as possible graduate debt free. As we enter a period of inevitable fiscal austerity, I too want to express my dedication to making sure that deserving students are able to study at AAP regardless of financial need, and I can assure you that the College will continue to push the boundaries of contemporary design thinking and making even during this period of budgetary restraint.

This spring semester promises a number of memorable events, including the inaugural term of Peter Eisenman’s three-year Rhodes Professorship; AAP’s fourth annual Case Studies in Urban Design conference; the completion of Cornell’s latest and undoubtedly greatest Solar Decathlon entry, and breaking ground for our much anticipated, much needed addition to the AAP campus, Milstein Hall. We will also conclude the search for a chair of the Department of Architecture, thereby completing a triad of new chairs for the College’s three departments.

We could not continue to offer the best education to the best students in these challenging times without the continued generosity of AAP’s friends and alumni. I have been enormously encouraged by the large number of AAP alumni who have reached out to help our students with internships and career counseling, and who have assisted the College with financial support. Thank you on behalf of AAP.

KENT KLEINMAN GALE AND IRA DRUKIER DEAN OF ARCHITECTURE, ART, AND PLANNING

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Spring 2009 AAPnews\\\2 Work\6 Folio\\\12 Review\14 Student news\\18 Faculty&Staff news\20 Alumni news\\\22 AAP News

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

College of Architecture, Art, and Planning Cornell University 129 Sibley Dome, Ithaca, NY 14853 T 607 255.5317 aap_newsletter@cornell.edu Editor Aaron Goldweber Contributing writers Dan Aloi, Jennifer Campbell, Elise Gold, Aaron Goldweber, Beth Kunz, Bridget Meeds, Michael Paul Simons.

Design Paul Soulellis (B.Arch. ’90) / Soulellis Studio Copyeditor Laura Glenn Cover Looking west from University Ave. towards Sibley College of Engineering, circa 1909. © March 2009, Cornell University Proposed view of Milstein Hall looking west down University Avenue. Credit: ESKQ, LLC.

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New at aap.cornell.edu

We invite you to take a look at five new sections that have been added to the AAP website.

• From Dean Kleinman, read a welcome message, bio, remarks, and more at aap.cornell.edu/explore/dean

CRITIC SPEAKS ON URBAN DESIGN AT TRANCIK RETIREMENT EVENT Architecture

critic Robert Campbell believes that “cities are better designed by generalists, by amateurs,” rather than by experts.

Campbell’s September 12, 2008 talk, “Do Cities Need Designers?” in a packed Lewis Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall, honored the retirement of Roger Trancik after 38 years as a Cornell professor of city and regional planning (CRP) and landscape architecture.

CRP professor Rolf Pendall introduced the lecture as a “celebration and commemoration” of Trancik’s long history at Cornell.

Trancik, who has been named professor emeritus, said: “Someone suggested a retirement party, and I resisted—I just wanted to ride off into the sunset. But we settled on an event with some content.” Campbell, he said, has been a longtime friend and “he’s inspired me throughout my career.”

“Critics don’t answer questions,” Campbell said. “We ask questions, and then we tell you if you’re right or wrong.”

He addressed his topic by looking at urban design in Buffalo, Boston, and Albany, among other cities. He showed slides comparing his dining room table with Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, and said the Empire State Plaza in Albany was “a still life for giants—there’s no human scale.” “[Buffalo] in 1900 had more millionaires per capita than any other American city,” he said, thanks to electrification centered in nearby Niagara Falls, and Buffalo being a major shipping and transportation hub.

“It’s a museum of architecture—the WPA style, Richardson, Wright, Olmsted—but Buffalo is now a synonym for frozen weather and lost jobs. My view about Buffalo is it should shrink to greatness. Colin Rowe [the influential architecture scholar who taught at Cornell from 1962 to 1990] called it one of the best-designed cities in the country.”

Campbell’s work as architecture critic of the Boston Globe won a 1996 Pulitzer Prize. He also is an architect, consultant, magazine writer, poet, and photographer.

“Every other critic is a consumer guide, whether for a movie, a restaurant, a play,” he said. “If a critic pans a play, it closes the next day. If I bomb a new building, they don’t tear it down.…

The job of the journalist is to medi-

• Learn more about the AAP NYC program by visiting aap.cornell.edu/nyc

• City and Regional Planning pages have been upgraded with the addition of a Cornell Urban Scholars Program section located at aap.cornell.edu/crp/programs/cusp

• The CRP site also boasts an improved outreach section at aap.cornell.edu/crp/outreach

• A new section focusing on detailed information on computer labs and digital classrooms available throughout the college can be found at aap.cornell.edu/resources/it

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Roger Trancik. Credit: Robert Barker.

A rendering of the inside of the NOMAS-Cornell’s firstplace design for a Black civil rights movement memorial in Washington, D.C. Peter Eisenman (’54, B.Arch. ’55) was recently named the newest Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of ’56 Professor.

ate between the necessarily confused expert and common sense. As a critic, your job is to participate in a lifetime conversation with the public on what makes a good environment.”

Campbell said the era of “funny shapes” in modern architecture is ending. “To make funny sculptures of buildings is just hateful,” he said. “Like this thing Rem Koolhaas is building [in China]. Any child can come up with a new shape.”

Following the lecture, Trancik was honored at a reception in the History of Art Gallery. His daughters, Anika Trancik ’94 and Jessika Trancik ’97, read email wishes sent by his former students, including Ken Reardon, former chair of city and regional planning and now at the University of Memphis.

Trancik established and directed an international studies program in Denmark for Cornell landscape architecture students; he has taught in the United States, Sweden, Denmark, and Italy.

He is the author of Finding Lost Space: Theories of Urban Design and Hamlets of the Adirondacks, among other books. His honors include the Paramount Professor Award for Excellence in Teaching at Cornell, and national awards from the American Planners Association and American Society of Landscape Architects, which elected him a national fellow in 1990. He was appointed a Fulbright scholar in 2004, completing an interdisciplinary heritage planning and conservation project in Panama for Latin America and the Caribbean.AAP

ARCHITECTURE PROGRAM NO. 1 Cornell University’s B.Arch. program received top ranking in the annual survey conducted by DesignIntelligence (DI). The 2009 list marks the fourth time in the past five years that the Cornell program has been ranked number one of the top 20 architecture programs in the U.S. In 2008 the undergraduate program was ranked number two.

The M.Arch. program was ranked number six out of the top graduate architecture programs. The five-year-old graduate architecture program has placed in the top 20 for the past three years.

The rankings were based on a survey conducted at more than 200 architecture firms and organizations in the U.S. These leading firms were asked about which academic programs best prepare students for professional practice. Those surveyed have direct experience hiring and evaluating the performance of recent architect graduates.

More than 900 architecture students were also surveyed about their satisfaction with their educational programs.AAP

CORNELL STUDENT CHAPTER WINS FIRST PRIZE AT NOMAS CONFERENCE The Cornell student chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architect Students (NOMAS) took first prize during the association’s 36th international conference and exposition, “Evolving Design Excellence Through Cultural Identity,” in Washington, DC, in October. This is the third consecutive year the Cornell chapter has won the competition.

“We applaud the commitment and resolve of the students to consistently perform at such a high level,” said Carlton T. Smith, president of the National Organization of Minority Architects, NOMAS’s parent association. “We know that each and every one of them will make their mark on society and the profession.”

For the competition, student chapters were asked to design a national memorial and interpretive center commemorating the Black civil rights movement on the National Mall at the foot of the U.S. Capitol building. The project also challenged the students to understand how the civil rights movement affected them, their families, and their communities. The competition required that the design include: a place of memory, contemplation, and reflection; a place for interpreting history and educating the community of visitors; an outdoor landscape for meditation or celebration; a place or marker of remembrance, depicting an important moment in the movement; an auditorium; a multipurpose demonstration space; a café; a bookstore/gift shop; and an idea center.

“We wanted to create a place in a world displaced by injustice—an architecture which would resonate under the lens of those who underwent the trials and tribulations of the movement as part of the visitor experience,” says Clayton Henry (B.Arch. ’12). “We designed a long rectangular walkway which gently penetrates the ground on one end and ascends into the sky on the other end— expressing itself as a dislodgment from the ground. The connection of the two domains, earth and sky, and the walkway as an interface between the two, becomes the medium in which the memorial manifests itself between the present and past and tying to the narrative of the civil rights movement.”

The project is designed to be located at what is referred to as the “Capitol Site,” a 229,000square-foot parcel set between Pennsylvania Avenue, Constitution Avenue, and First and Third Streets NW, just north of the reflecting pool. The site directly mirrors the U.S. Botanical Garden site on the opposite (south) side. It sits diagonally across from the Museum of the American Indian and next to the east wing of the National Gallery of Art. A number of Cornell students worked on the competition, including a major contribution by Andrew Nahmias (B.Arch. ’09). The 13 students attending the conference were: Kristina Alford (B.Arch. ’13), Marco Andrade (B.Arch. ’10), Elita Cochrane (U.R.S. ’09), Clayton Henry (B.Arch. ’12), Justin Hui (B.Arch. ’11), Hoang Viet Nguyen (B.Arch. ’12), Marvine Pierre (B.Arch. ’11), Wajeha Qureshi (B.Arch. ’13), Julio Torres Santana (B.Arch. ’11), Mauricio Vieto (B.Arch. ’13), Stephen Whitaker (B.Arch. ’11), Charles Williams (B.Arch. ’13), and Lester Yu (B.Arch. ’09). The five student presenters were: Andrade, Henry, Hui, Torres Santana, and Yu. The group’s faculty advisers were Jeremy Foster and Vince Mulcahy. Visiting Critic Aleksandr Mergold was instrumental in guidance in the design concept. Additionally, Leon Lawrence, the staff adviser, accompanied the students to the conference.AAP

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EISENMAN NAMED RHODES PROFESSOR Internationally known architect and scholar Peter Eisenman (’54, B.Arch. ’55) has been appointed Cornell’s newest Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of ’56 Professor. Eisenman’s works include large-scale housing and urban design projects, facilities for educational institutions, and private houses. He has studied and made formal use of concepts from linguistics, philosophy, and mathematics in his designs.

His recent projects include the University of Phoenix Stadium, home to the Arizona Cardinals and site of Super Bowl 2008; the unfinished, six-building City of Culture of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela, Spain; a railroad station in Pompeii, still in development; and the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Earlier projects include the Aronoff Center for Art and Design at the University of Cincinnati and the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts at Ohio State University.

Prior to establishing his architectural practice (Eisenman Architects in New York) in 1980, Eisenman was primarily an educator and theorist. In 1967, he founded the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, an international think tank for architecture. In 1969, through an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, he became associated with a group of young architects who became known as the New York Five. The group included Richard Meier (B.Arch. ’57), Charles Gwathmey, Michael Graves, and John Hejduk.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. After Cornell, Eisenman earned an M.S. in architecture from Columbia University in 1960, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Cambridge in 1962 and 1963. Eisenman holds the Louis I. Kahn Professor of Architecture Chair at Yale for a limitless term. His academic career includes teaching at Cambridge University and many years at Princeton, Yale, and Ohio State.

His recent books include Code X: The City of Culture of Galicia (2005); Eisenman: Inside Out, Selected Writings, 1963–1988 (2004); Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques (2003); and Written into the Void, Selected Writings, 1990–2004 (2007).

Rhodes professorships at Cornell are awarded for a period of three years (with an option to renew for two additional years) to those at the pinnacle of their careers in scholarship, public life, government, international affairs, health, nutrition, agriculture, business and industry, the professions, the arts, communication, or any comparable field. Rhodes professors visit Ithaca for one week during each year that they serve.AAP

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“Cell phones #2, Atlanta 2005” Chris Jordan.

DRIVING DESIGN The design arts, especially those disciplines that attend to the shape of the constructed human habitat including architecture, art, and planning, are experiencing a resurgence. One reason for this is that the major issues facing contemporary society—rapid urbanization, global warming and climate change, and an unprecedented technological revolution—are the type of human events that demand the synthetic and creative thinking typical of designers and atypical of the more narrowly practiced sciences. Schools of design are increasingly valued as providing a vital pedagogical space that privileges expansive and experimental approaches to seemingly intractable issues in which the very formulation of the problem is the problem, and in which “answers” are not solutions to questions but propositions for desirable ways of reordering human affairs. It will come as no surprise that I embrace this development.

But first I want to present an opposing perspective, for it is too true to ignore. Design is responsible for some of the most egregiously wasteful and environmentally damaging behavior imaginable. It is an old saw, but the production of desire through design has stimulated and fueled absurd patterns of consumption and production. Early industrialization made it possible to satisfy commodity hunger, quickly. Mass production has arguably made matters worse, faster. More recently, mass customization and user-based design tools have slipped a sociopolitical mask over what is frequently merely product differentiation in niche markets: pace that most seductive new device, arguments that the iPhone fortifies individual agency and defines a new type of participatory democracy are largely exaggerated. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 130 million cell phones, each presumably with its own personal ringtone, are thrown away every year, demonstrating a remarkable degree of behavioral conformity among a vast number of free agents. As Bruce Nussbaum, who edits the design pages for Business Week magazine, observed: even Apple’s design genius Jonathan Ive has no project for building durable or recyclable digital devices.

Design is a contested field, and modern design theory has come to it only reluctantly and out of necessity. The paradigmatic narrative here is the story of the iconic machine-age artifact, the Model T. Put simply, the Model T was never designed. No drawing or model or other representation of the Model T was ever produced, nor could it have been since it was not a planned artifact. Instead it (and the assembly process closely associated with it and even the architecture that housed the assembly lines) accumulated piecemeal, like a collage under perpetual reconfiguration. There was no design department at Ford during the Model T era. Rather, Henry Ford believed that the innate forces of industrial production constituted an environment suited for an industrial version of natural selection. Through dogged adherence to the making of the fittest vehicle—for Ford this was the most robust vehicle for the cheapest price—a form would emerge, naturally. The machine age would thus produce its own material/

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aesthetic vocabulary in much the same way that nature optimizes a bird’s form.

This notion was widely held, and modernity generally subscribed to a sense of inevitability with regard to its aesthetic agenda. Not infrequently, the “Ford” was compared to the “Doric,” both admired as object lessons in formal perfection, each in its own way classical.

This approach destroyed Ford’s preeminence, and in 1927 the company all but shut down. (The famous photographs by Charles Sheeler of the Ford River Rouge Plant, which have come to signify the silent majesty of industrial forms, were taken in 1927. The timing explains why Sheeler was granted access to the normally frenetic factory interiors, and why there are virtually no workers in the images.) Massive market share had migrated elsewhere, to a company that had an antithetical approach to shaping its products. Alfred Sloan, president of General Motors, subscribed to the concept of product variety, offering a range of body types, color choices, and optional styling features: “A car for every purse and purpose.” Harley Earl joined GM in 1927, heading the so-called Art and Color Division, and the annual model was born. When a humbled Ford reopened for business in 1928, it too had a design department; there is a significant contemporaneous picture taken from within Ford’s new design division, showing a chalkboard on which is drawn, in pure elevation, the 1928 Model A. Sloanism, not Fordism, is the true legacy of the automobile industry.

Sloanism offers two lessons: one important, the other essential. First, design is inseparable from modern production. This is comforting to know for graduates of design-based programs, but it does not necessarily make a better or more interesting world. Second, there is no natural “design-degree-zero” in the manmade world, and this is critical to know if we are to understand the full scope of designers’ responsibilities. No airplane, clock, building, city plan, paint chip, or pair of shoes is formally, or materially neutral. Each of these is a fundamental component of culture, quite literally constituting the material scaffold of our social lives. To appreciate this—first to actually see it as such, then to analyze its particular character, and finally to effect change—requires formal, spatial, and material literacy. Lacking this literacy, the built environment appears as natural and mute, beyond critical discourse, beyond interrogation, beyond change. It is clearly important that we assume responsibility for interrogating, and reimagining the form of our cities, the condition of our infrastructure, the configuration of our buildings, the patterns of our domestic settings, the limits of our aesthetic norms.

None of these are natural. These are conditions subject to design. And this is why design education is increasingly significant. It sharpens the intelligence with which we comprehend our common artifactual world and makes us collectively responsible for its form.AAP

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::::::::::::::::::: How do you feel about coming to AAP in a time of change and growth, particularly with the impending Paul Milstein Hall project?

Q&A WITH DEAN KENT KLEINMAN

AAP is full of opportunities, and it is a privilege to join a college that is the intellectual home of generations of leaders in architecture, art, and planning. AAP’s graduates and faculty have shaped design culture across the globe.

The students and faculty are sharp and bright and absolutely committed to excellence. Arriving in Ithaca, I immediately felt welcomed by the college and the university. But it would also be fair to say that the college has a dauntingly grand reputation. The bar is high.

I know that Paul Milstein Hall is very much on people’s minds. I am, of course, familiar with the long history of searching for the right architectural response to the challenge of expanding the college’s physical plant. It is critical that we take care of the needs of our students and faculty who for far too long have been teaching and learning in inadequate spaces. I think it is important that we build in a fashion that respects the architectural legacy of the setting while advancing the standards of excellence and inquiry that Cornell embodies. I am convinced that we have a design that delivers both the pedagogical instrument we need and one that contributes in a very substantial way to the quality and renown of the institution.

I should add that Milstein Hall is just one part of a bigger equation—that is, what happens to Rand, what happens to Sibley, to Tjaden, to the Foundry? There are new programming opportunities that we are just beginning to explore.

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What about the recent expansion of the college’s New York City program, in both academics and professional practice?

The New York City presence—AAP NYC— should be seen in the context of our overall geographic footprint: Ithaca-Rome-New York.

Each locale enables students to study art and design methods and approaches that are specific to a place and a culture of shaping the built world. Rome offers lessons in how the form of the city and its elements are constructed from the layers of history, a kind of “archeological” approach to design thinking and making. The city pushes back on designers with the weight of history. New York is the opposite. New York offers unparalleled access to emerging design and art practices and fast-paced speculative design work. New York also offers our planning and architecture students exposure to one of the most fascinating attempts to align market-driven urban development with a vision of sustainable urban growth.

At the time of your appointment, thenprovost Biddy Martin noted you would bring “a strong interdisciplinary perspective” to the college and the university. How do you foresee applying that perspective?

“Interdisciplinary” is getting a lot of play currently and it pays to take a critical look at what we mean by it. I subscribe to disciplinary expertise; I believe in the deep study of a field, whether in architecture or art or planning. You don’t give up your discipline and become a generalist.

Rather, as you become deeply knowledgeable in your field you also become profoundly aware of all that you do not know; you touch more and more areas that stimulate your curiosity. It is my hope that expertise breeds curiosity. One role of an academic institution is to open doors for curious minds, and I have found that when such minds meet, true interdisciplinary work can thrive.

Have you identified any particular issues you’d like to address as priorities in the college?

Building the next generation of excellent teachers—the existing generation is world famous as such—is a priority. In the next five or so years many senior AAP faculty will retire, and finding the next-generation faculty is something we have to pay a lot of attention to. This cuts across all three departments.

The three-department model for the college is not a limit—we could add a department, we could do dual degrees with other departments, we could do minors in other departments. Landscape architecture, media studies, and interior design are fields I want to get to know much better, and I want our students to filter back and forth. Our students shouldn’t be limited by administrative structures.AAP Read an expanded version of this interview at www.aap.cornell.edu/news/newsitem. cfm?customel_datapageid_2892=122951.

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DEAN KLEINMAN WELCOMED TO AAP AT NEW YORK CITY RECEPTION Kent Kleinman, the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of Architecture, Art, and Planning, was the guest of honor at a reception on October 26, in New York City. More than 200 alumni and friends of AAP attended the event.

“I am honored to head this distinguished college and delighted to have a chance to meet the steadfastly loyal, wildly successful, and famously reserved alumni of AAP,” said Kleinman, who started as dean on September 1. “The college’s graduates are contributing throughout the world as leading designers, planners, and artists. It is our job and my passion to enable the next generation of students to do no less.”

AAP Advisory Council cochairs Susie Rodriguez (B.Arch. ’82) and Rick Krochalis ’72 hosted the reception in the Sky Room at the New Museum on the Bowery in Manhattan.

“We are so pleased to have found such an accomplished leader with tremendous intellect, energy, and scholarship and a vision for the college,” Rodriguez said, welcoming attendees. “We feel quite certain that he will build on the strengths of the college as well as take it in new directions and to new heights.”

Among the attendees were Kent Hubbell (B.Arch. ’69), professor of architecture and Cornell dean of students; Frank Robinson, director of the 02 Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art; Anthony Vidler, professor and dean at Cooper Union’s School 01 Dean Kent Kleinman comments during a M.Arch., second-year, fall-term review. Credit: William Staffeld. of Architecture; and Cornell Trustee Jill Lerner 02 (L to R) Jill Lerner (B.Arch. ’76), Rick Krochalis ’72, and Susie Rodriguez (B.Arch. ’82) in front of the AAP wall mural at the (B.Arch. ’76), principal at Kohn Pedersen Fox Asdean’s welcome reception. Credit: Jesse Winter. sociates.AAP

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environment constantly undergo processes of abstraction and transformation from their origin to their state of consumption. Most of us are no longer involved with manual technologies as a means of subsistence; the result of having lost touch with the processes behind mutations is a new amnesiac social-aesthetic construct with no recollection of its past—a product of seemingly invisible machinery.

A project exploring these themes began at the crossroads of two concurrent events: our commitment to competing for the Margaret Bourke-White Photography Portfolio Prize and a colleague’s trips to a slaughterhouse in Troy, Pennsylvania. We ended up visiting the site twice: the first time we intuitively captured photographic documentation of everything that incited our curiosity, allowing instinct and shock to determine our actions; the second time, we developed a sensitivity toward the notions of trace and place and a fascination for machinery and abstraction.

“Our submission for the photography competition aimed to create a distinct experience of intimacy, mystification, and shock beauty— awe. From hundreds of photographs eight images were surgically selected, and 4" x 6" prints were presented on 8" x 10" boards.

The project then appeared as an installation at the Hartell Gallery in September 2008. Notions of machinery and abstraction became multilayered and refined in concept (processes of abstraction), content of the photographs (cow-to-beef transformation by the slaughterhouse machine), and sensorial perception of the installation (mechanical reproduction of an image by a carousel slide projector).”

Leona Road, Troy, PA 16947 “In our postindustrial society, the objects that constitute our physical

6——Andres Mendoza (B.Arch. ’10) /Daniel Quesada (B.Arch. ’10)/Hugh Hayden (B.Arch. ’07)

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MEDITATIONS ON MAKING The first year of one’s education in architecture at Cornell has traditionally been an experience approaching mythic significance.

It is an especially intense period, simultaneously prolonged and fleeting. Lifelong friendships are initiated. Significant issues, themes, and values are addressed. Various design devices—drawing, prototyping, and fabrication—are introduced, not solely as modes of representation but primarily as vehicles and assets for critical contemplation. It is a moment when a state of “not knowing” must be embraced so that the process of design may unfold.

This initially uncomfortable state is the antidote to the prescriptive, the preconceived. It is also required for a journey into a territory of new thoughts and unfamiliar possibilities.

It is a fertile ground for a leap of faith.

The same conditions apply to the first-year design curriculum. It too is best approached as a design exploration in its own right—in some sense operating as an overtly orchestrated analogue to the very process that the students are encouraged to embrace within their own work. It too must lose itself, suspend its disbelief in a fashion that parallels what the students are going through. It too must take risks in order to become unharnessed from a rigid prescription or formula. While still structured to address a core set of issues, the curriculum must remain opportunistic, open to the unforeseen. And in this sense, the students, while authors of their own particular design projects, become witnesses and collaborators in the joint venture of the first-year studio.

The 2008–2009 incarnation of the studio has focused on the notion of architecture as “instrument”; that is, in most general terms, it dealt with architecture as an intermediary between people and the world. Modes of seeing, recording, and interpreting were always stressed with a fundamental reliance on making as an aide to thinking. Much of the work during this first semester was in one-to-one scale. As a result we could focus on direct relationships between body and artifice, while addressing the significance of ground, air, light, weight, materiality, joinery, and the patterns of relationship between design intent, structure, and craft.

As for the next phase…we shall see. Surely the scale of consideration will change, while “instrumentality” and “intermediation” will continue as central themes. The change in scale inevitably will produce a shift: the studio work will increasingly refer not only to itself but also to some other thing at some other scale and place, ultimately to be realized by others.

Instructors: Visiting Critic Aleksandr Mergold and Associate Professor Vincent Mulcahy.

Teaching associates: Nikole Bouchard (B.Arch. ’06), Cyrus Dochow (B.Arch. ’08), Reilly Hogan (B.Arch. ’08), Siobhan Rockcastle (B.Arch. ’08), Robin Liu (B.Arch. ’08), Steve Schwenk (M.Arch. ’09).AAP

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Work \\\Bosnia Initiatives Graves\Evett-Miller——————— 01 02

Professor David Lewis confers with the student members of Partners for Progress before they present to their Bosnian clients their findings about development opportunities. Credit: William Staffeld.

Anthony Graves, Broadside (2008), oil and screen print on paper, 24" x 30".

Opposite page Nine images from Jessica Evett-Miller’s “Strata.”

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STUDENT CONSULTANTS PRESENT ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVES FOR BOSNIA Real-world planning experience was on display as Partners for Progress Ltd., a pro-bono consulting firm created by Cornell students, recently presented two programs they developed for the Bosnia Initiatives for Local Development (BILD) Foundation and the South East Europe Development Solutions (SEEDS) Foundation. Representatives of BILD, SEEDS, and the U.S. Embassy in Bosnia attended.

Formed by graduate students of CRP professor David Lewis’s “Project Planning in Developing Countries” workshop, Partners for Progress (PfP), has identified four target development opportunities in Tuzla, a city in northeastern Bosnia: reducing education disparity, increasing civic engagement, improving access to technology, and enhancing professional skills. Using the proposals developed by PfP, BILD and SEEDS plan to launch their New Initiatives Support Center (NISC) and Tuzla Summer Institute (TSI) in July 2009.

“The students in the class represent an extraordinary assembly of talent,” said Lewis, who also directs the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA).

Christopher Bragdon, executive director of BILD, has worked closely with Lewis and the class this semester. “We are fortunate to be working with him,” said Lewis; “he is a real client, with real projects, and real funding sources.”

“And real expectations and cutting no slack,” added Bragdon with a laugh.

“The idea is to give the students opportunities to be engaged in producing project proposals that will stand up to the test of scrutiny for international funding agencies,” Lewis said.

Of the challenges Bosnia faces as it moves toward membership in the EU, PfP focused on secondary school enrollment and tertiary matriculation.

“The education system in Bosnia is seeking to provide students with the necessary skills and capabilities to enhance domestic civic engagement and compete globally,” explained Anne Park, comanager for the TSI project and a first-year CIPA student.

NISC will provide students and professionals with a facility equipped with 40 computer stations; a business center, café, and conference room. “They already have a building, and students have prepared preliminary layouts,” Lewis said.

“There is nothing else that combines all the components of NISC. Professor Lewis’s students had to start from scratch,” said Bragdon.

The TSI will offer a four-week program to prepare students for university education, professional careers, and civic engagement. It will concentrate on English, computer, and professional development skills. English Language Fellows from the U.S. Embassy in Bosnia will help develop the curriculum and will be paired with Bosnian coteachers. Additional instructors will come from Cornell graduate programs.

TSI will be taught through the Tuzla Muftiate. While the Islamic high school will house TSl, the program will serve a diverse student body.

Janet Miller, public affairs officer for the U.S. Embassy in Bosnia, said the students provided a “thorough and thoughtful proposal.” She, along with Bragdon, Lewis, and Antonia Rosenbaum of SEEDS, participated in a post-presentation discussion on funding and recruitment challenges.

Bragdon, pleased with the progress, said, “I’ve lived in Tuzla for 12 years on and off, and in these proposals I’m learning things about Tuzla I never knew. We will be benefiting greatly from this project.”AAP

GRAVES NAMED HARTELL AWARD RECIPIENT Anthony Graves (M.F.A. ’09) has been selected by the art department faculty as the 2008 recipient of the John Hartell Graduate Award for Art and Architecture.

Graves is an artist and curator currently based in Ithaca. He has exhibited works through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York City, at Exit Art, and at Oni Gallery in Boston, as well as in Copenhagen. He is the founder of BrickandBalloon.net and is one of the founders and editors of the online archive and journal, c-m-l.org. Graves was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2004–2005.

The artist’s work stages various effects by layering competing visual systems. “My works are an attempt to negotiate between the traditional language of painting and more recent digital advances in image production,” says Graves. “It mucks about in the arena created by the historical differentiation of the virtual and the actual, and the modes of visuality they impose.”

A monetary prize is awarded as part of the recognition. Five graduate students submitted entries in 2008. Members of Hartell’s family, friends, and former students established the award in his memory after his death in October 1995 at the age of 93. Hartell joined the architecture faculty in 1930 and the art faculty in 1940, serving as chair of the art department from 1940 until 1959.AAP

EVETT-MILLER WINS PHOTOGRAPHY PORTFOLIO COMPETITION

Jessica Evett-Miller (M.F.A. ’09) is the 2008–2009 recipient of the annual Margaret Bourke-White Photography Portfolio Prize. EvettMiller’s winning portfolio, “Strata,” was on exhibit in the Hartell Gallery in January. A reception was held on January 29, where she was presented with a check for $7,500.

More than 700 photos were submitted in 76 portfolios for this year’s competition. Patricia Phillips, chair of the Department of Art, stated that there was “consensus and genuine enthusiasm for the quality and character” of the winning portfolio among the judges.

An anonymous donor created the competition in 2007.

The competition is named after Margaret Bourke-White ’27, renowned photographer and onetime Cornell student. The annual contest is unique in that it is open to all regularly enrolled undergraduate and graduate Cornell students.

The 2008–2010 competition will be announced during the spring 2009 semester, and deadlines for submissions will be in November.

Evett-Miller was honored by the recognition and commented on the significance of receiving an award established in the memory of Bourke-White.

“As a pioneer in advancing the position of women in the field of photography, Margaret BourkeWhite helped pave the way for me to pursue work in this field as well,” says Evett-Miller. “Her commitment to her work, her independence and sense of adventure, and her compassion for others continue to inspire young women photographers, myself included,” says Evett-Miller.

While photo portfolios are considered strictly on their merit for the Bourke-White Prize, EvettMiller is also part of a family legacy at Cornell. Her father, professor emeritus John C. Miller (M.Arch. ’60), taught design and theory in the Department of Architecture from 1977 to 2003. Her mother, Elissa Evett ’67, M.A. ’76 and Ph.D. ’80, taught art history from 1976 to 1981; and grandfather, Kenneth W. Evett, taught painting in the Department of Fine Arts from 1948 to 1978.

Bourke-White (1904–1971) first studied photography at Columbia University and later graduated from Cornell University. She helped define the field of photojournalism in the ’20s and ’30s and is well known for her haunting images of the Great Depression. Bourke-White is associated with many “firsts,” including first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union, the first female war correspondent during World War II, and first female photographer for Fortune and Life magazines.AAP

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\\\Fall 2008——Aman Campbell Chu Douglis Elson Halperin Hester Iacovoni Iwamoto/Sc Maslennikov Mergold Miller-Travis Oxman Poticha Rakowitz Spiller Kwame Sundaram W 01 Credit: William Staffeld. 02 Lebbeus Woods. Credit: Robert Stuart. 03 Neil Spiller. Credit: Robert Stuart.

PHOTO EXHIBIT CAPTURED CORNELL URBAN SCHOLARS PROGRAM’S “WORK IN PROGRESS”

The Cornell Urban Scholars Program (CUSP) presented a photography and text exhibit about fieldwork and reflections— work in progress—by recent urban scholars and urban mentors. The exhibit appeared in the Hartell Gallery in October.

“CUSP students captured many of the images while working in the field, and their words testify to the power of the program,” said the exhibition’s designer, Julie McIntyre (U.R.S. ’09).

In one of the text pieces, communication major Micah Angela Bell ’10, noted, “The [mentorship initiative] defies convention and stagnancy.”

CUSP supports efforts of New York City’s most innovative nonprofit organizations and government agencies to eliminate the causes of poverty. It encourages talented students to pursue public service careers with organizations working with the city’s children, families, and communities.

In CUSP’s summer program, undergraduates complete a paid internship serving low-income residents in New York City. CUSP’s Graduate Research Fellowship in Community Development Policy-Making engages students in participatory action research on problems in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

In the CUSP Mentorship Initiative, Cornell students mentor middle-school students in an at-risk neighborhood of New York City, while attending weekly seminars with Cornell mentors.

See the exhibit online at aap.cornell.edu/crp/ people/cusp-exhibit. cfm.AAP

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Michael Rakowitz

In October, Chicago-based artist and associate professor of art and theory at Northwestern University Michael Rakowitz lectured to a packed house of art and architecture students on several recent projects including paraSITE—a series of custom-built, flexible shelters for the homeless inflated and warmed by the exterior vents of buildings’ HVAC systems. While on campus, Rakowitz also did studio visits and critiques with M.F.A. students in the Department of Art. He’s seen here (in black) with David Dixon (M.F.A. ’10).

“FROM EARTH ART TO ECO ART” 4BKs: The Four MARKED 40th ANNIVERSARY OF Books of ArchiculHISTORIC CORNELL EXHIBIT A. D. White House hosted an ture, Discovering art and theory workshop, “From Earth Art to Eco Art,” on October 17 to 18, to celebrate the 40th anPalladio in Central niversary of the landmark “Earth Art Exhibition.”

In February 1969, the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art at Cornell was the primary site for projects and installations by artists Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, Hans Haacke, Richard Long, PA and Beyond Jan Dibbets, Neil Jenney, David Medalla, Robert Morris, and Gunther Uecker.

“It was only the second international show of what became a very influential genre of installation art,” said Timothy Murray, director of the Society for the Humanities, who organized the workshop with Department of Art chair Patricia Phillips.

Working with exhibit curator Willoughby Sharp, museum director Thomas Leavitt asked students and artists to create additional sculptural works and excavations all over campus.

“Robert Smithson did his famous salt installations and Dennis Oppenheim cut, using chain saws, a literal channel through the ice on Beebe Lake,” Murray said. “Tom recruited students to build these installations all over the place. It was such a huge hit, it became part of a massive international art movement.”

Leavitt was a guest of honor at the workshop, which was open to the public. Participants reflected on the art’s aesthetics and sociopolitical effects extending to recent digital and sculptural interventions in land and ecological art.

The “Earth Art” anniversary coincided with the Society for the Humanities’ 2008–09 research theme, “Water: A Critical Concept for the Humanities.”

“When I discovered it was the 40th anniversary, I thought it would be important to remember… the history of the house,” Murray said. The workshop addressed “the impact of a new explosion of art around issues of ecology and sustainability,” he added. “A lot of works in this area have strong technological platforms, which we’re archiving as well.”

Marilyn Rivchin, a senior lecturer in film, worked at the museum in 1969, and shot footage of “Earth Art” installations, which screened during the event. Sharp delivered remarks at the opening session, which included a collective project proposal by assistant professor of art Renate Ferro; a discussion of the 1969 exhibition’s historical importance with former Cornell art history graduate student Navjotika Kuma ’04 and Marin Sullivan of the University of Michigan; and a slideshow of archival photographs from Kroch Library.

Oppenheim gave a plenary lecture. His work has evolved from earth and body art to video and performance art to the transformation of everyday objects, machine pieces, and large-scale architectural sculpture.

Artists discussed contemporary experiments in digital- and installation-based ecological art.

They included Brandon Ballengée, who works with fish and amphibians, combining environmental art with ecological research; collaborators Christine Nadir and Cary Peppermint; environmental artist Stacy Levy; and composer/sound artist Daniel Warner. The session included lectures by Phillips, Verena Andermatt Conley, and Patricia Zimmerman.AAP

JAZZED ABOUT ART: AMERICAN ARTISTIC RENAISSANCE SYMPOSIUM In the 1970s, painter Frederick J. Brown’s studio loft in downtown Manhattan attracted many young artists, musicians, dancers, and writers to collaborate and experiment. The American Artistic Renaissance Symposium, September 22–24, 2008, at Cornell, reunited Brown and many major players from that scene, including jazz greats Charlie Haden, Henry Threadgill, and Sam Rivers and jazz critic Stanley Crouch. Three panel discussions explored the confluence of visual and performance art, dance, and experimental jazz; the Hans Bethe House hosted a jam session. Participants also visited classrooms and held master classes.

“This is an unusual and historical reunion of a large number of towering figures of American art and culture of the last quarter of the 20th century,” said Bethe House Dean and CRP professor Porus Olpadwala.

Brown is well known for colorful, vivid portraits of musicians, and depictions of presidents, artists, folk heroes, and Native Americans. His daughter, Sebastienne Brown (B.Arch. ’08), donated his artworks to Cornell in 2006 and in 2007, after a visit with Threadgill. After enjoying interactions with faculty and students, the two artists discussed bringing a group of their friends and collaborators to Cornell, which led to the expanded symposium.

The panels discussed the history and conditions that helped establish the loft scene from the 1960s forward, how creative directions evolved, effects on culture and the artists who followed, and the prospects for such collaborations today. Cornell professor of music Steven Pond and Brent Edwards, a professor at Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies, moderated.AAP

In November, Austin+Mergold’s Jason Austin (B.Arch. ’00) and Aleksandr Mergold (B.Arch. ’00) presented a folio of laser-engraved, hand-printed woodcuts titled 4BKs: The Four Books of Archiculture, Discovering Palladio in Central PA and Beyond, at Hartell Gallery. The work was created in collaboration with printmakers from the Department of Art. The 4BKs are the culmination of extensive design work undertaken at an old farm site in rural Central Pennsylvania. The A+M books express modern Central PA building conventions in a systematic language reminiscent of the 16th-century work of Andrea Palladio in his four books of architecture, Quattro Libri.

Book I focuses on architectural orders, wall types, details, site selection; Book II covers private residences and housing; Book III highlights bridges, fountains, site planning, and miscellaneous typologies; Book IV shows places of public assembly. A+M modernized the woodcut process common in Palladio’s times with plywood blocks laserengraved with AutoCAD drawings.

Integral to the project were James Bowman (B.Arch. ’06), Cyrus Dochow (B.Arch. ’08), Lindsey Glover (M.F.A. ’08), Robin Liu (B.Arch. ’08), Jimmy Shi (B.Arch. ’09), Denise Ramzy, Sally Reynolds, and professors Elisabeth Meyer (art) and John Zissovici (architecture).

4BKs will be shown at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia this spring.AAP

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Scott Moss Joyner Katchor Kipnis Klosterman Langlands/Bell Lewis Magid Woods

ARCHITECTURE OF DISBELIEF Thinking—and drawing—outside the box were the thrust of the “Architecture of Disbelief” symposium from October 30 to November 1, 2008, in Ithaca, where prominent architects discussed their projects—some built, many unbuilt, others sketched or conceptual.

The works shown and discussed were often not buildings, but the ideas of buildings. The symposium’s focus on radically speculative work—and designs requiring a willing suspension of disbelief—reflected an agenda within Cornell architecture programs to reexamine the links between theory and contemporary practice. The participants shared personal viewpoints on their unrealized projects, providing a look at their visual and conceptual preoccupations. Critics also addressed the precedents and intellectual positions raised by the architects.

Architect, critic, and Bartlett professor Neil Spiller, the author of Visionary Architecture, who is often described as “cyber-Gothic” for his phantasmagorical line drawings and his work addressing virtual realms, had an appropriate venue for his October 30 keynote address: Sage Chapel where Kent Kleinman welcomed students and faculty. From the pulpit, Spiller’s slide lecture included projects from his mentor Cedric Price and “the wonderful, wacky world of Archigram” (the early ’60s British architecture subculture).

Lebbeus Woods lectured the next day to a standing-room-only crowd in Goldwin Smith Hall’s Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium. “I’m a con ceptualist. My work has always been addressed to architects, to my colleagues and students,” said Woods, cofounder of the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture and a professor at Cooper Union. “We can work with ideas; those are free.”

Woods talked about how the fall of the World Trade Center inspired an installation in Paris, and showed how his designs derived from observing patterns of human movement and settlement, using a project in Vienna and slums in India and Mexico City as examples. He suggested a system of self-sustaining capsules as a way to improve shantytowns. “You have to give people the freedom to reshape their own environments to some extent, with help from outside.”

“A recession forces a crisis. It prompts different sorts of architectural endeavor and triggers serious speculative work, which is what this symposium is all about. When the economy turns down, the world of the unbuilt or the yet-to-bebuilt gets very busy and architectural academia has a strategic role in guiding that business and making good use of its agency,” said Mark Morris, who organized the symposium with fellow architecture graduate programs coordinator Jim Williamson.

Williamson said, “It is the period of most advancement, when people try to stretch the boundaries and challenge the status quo to the level of discomfort.”

Following Woods’s lecture faculty, students, and the symposium participants attended a Halloween masque reception at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. First-year architecture students provided rows of densely carved glowing jock-o-lanterns at the entrance of I. M. Pei’s building, which echoed with music from disc jockey Adam Vana (B.Arch. ’09).

Other visionaries revealed their interests in the diverse areas of digital practice, multimedia projects, membrane technology, computation and genetics, and interactive computer simulation.

They included critic, curator, and educator Jeffrey Kipnis, who has collaborated with Peter Eisenman (’54, B.Arch. ’55) and philosopher Jacques Derrida; architect and researcher Neri Oxman of the MIT Design Lab; Evan Douglis, chair of undergraduate architecture at Pratt; and artists Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, both featured in Charles Saatchi’s “Sensation” exhibition and recently nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize. Theorist Karl Chu defined disbelief as a requisite philosophical and metaphysical condition for creative work. UCLA professor and architect Dagmar Richter discussed a redesign of Le Corbusier’s “Dom-ino House,” whereby the original performance criteria of interwar housing needs was adjusted to create a contemporary “Dom-in(f) o House” meant to address shifting personal and urban identities. Richter, focusing squarely on the theme of disbelief, argued for a category of architecture as pure research. Many on the panel agreed and expanded upon her position.

In her critique in the Cornell Daily Sun, architecture student Kimberly Chew (B.Arch. ’11) summed up: “The significance of the symposium lies not in the works themselves, but in the nature of theoretical design. This was the essence, the most significant conclusions from the remarks at the roundtable discussion. That these complicated and intelligent design iterations exist—that they have potential for physical manifestation in significant architectural, social, and even political, economic, and cultural ways—is the most important rationale behind the symposium.”

“Architecture of Disbelief” was presented by the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and the Department of Architecture and its Preston H. Thomas Memorial Lecture Series. Thomas was an architecture student who died in a car accident in the mid-1970s.AAP

2008 Preston Thomas Lecture Series

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Halloween masque reception at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, following the Lebbeus Woods lecture during the “Architecture of Disbelief� symposium. Credit: Julie Tabbitas Moore.

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n ———————— HISTORIC PRESERVATION GRADUATE STUDENTS HEAD NORTH OF THE BORDER This fall, having only just arrived in Ithaca, first-year graduate students in Cornell University’s Historic Preservation Planning program were already packing their bags and heading out of town. The group, led by Jeffrey Chusid, associate professor of CRP, took a “mobile classroom” trip to Montreal and attended the Association for Preservation Technology International (APT) conference there.

“Historic preservation is a synthetic form of design,” said Chusid. “The purpose of the fall field trip is to bring the program’s first-year students to a city and talk about its evolution and principal issues having to do with planning there. It is really important for our students to get as broad a sense of what a city means as possible. Hence, we were talking about conservation issues on an 18th-century church, going to a drag show, going to the farmers’ markets, looking at the regulations that apply to how buildings are designated and protected, and more.”

On the first evening of the trip, Nurit Shir, a first-year student from Montreal, led students on a tour of a vibrant city neighborhood, beginning on what she described as “a hip little street with cafés and bars” and ending in an area where warehouses are being converted into lofts.

“I wanted to show my classmates parts of Montreal that they wouldn’t have encountered otherwise: the old train tracks and warehouses, the community garden, and the quiet, colorful streets of the Plateau and Mile End,” said Shir.

Getting to know a new city was really valuable in itself,” said second-year HHP student and coorgranizer of the trip, Natalie Franz. “Practice in reading new places and understanding their historic development is useful when considering a preservation plan for a large neighborhood or looking at a single building.”

“We wandered around looking at fantastic things, such as the underground city, art sites, and Chinatown, where we had lunch,” explained Chusid. “The point is to give students a sense of place and the variety of stakeholders involved in the preservation of that place, along with the variety of resources—built cultural resources, natural resources, and intangible resources like the French culture of Montreal.”

At the APT conference, the Cornell contingent was the largest student group in attendance.

All first-year HPP students, some second-year students and alumni, and Professor Michael Tomlan, director of HPP and an APT fellow attended. This year’s theme was the interdisciplinary nature of heritage preservation. Students spent two full days at the conference and attended various sessions, including a panel on historic cements and binders organized by Chusid.

“I think all the Cornell students in attendance were happy to have gone,” said Franz. “For many of us, it was our first national or international conference, and it was interesting both to get a better idea of the range of preservation technology professionals out there and to see how professionals share their work in the conference format.”AAP

CELLIST ADRIANNE NGAM WINS CONCERTO COMPETITION Cellist and Cornell student Adrianne Ngam (B.Arch. ’12) won the fifth annual Cornell Concerto Competition on December 14, 2008, in Barnes Hall. She was also featured in a March 1, 2009 concert with the Cornell Symphony Orchestra.

Ngam performed Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera’s Pampeana No. 2, accompanied by Blaise Bryski on piano, in the competition’s preliminary and final rounds. Both events were open to the public.

Fourteen students performed concertos on violin, viola, cello, piano, horn, and bass during the preliminary round, from which four finalists were selected: Ngam; Daniel Anastasio, piano; Bee-Seon Keum, violin; and Chris Gerig, bass.

A native of St. Paul, Ngam has been studying cello since 1997. Her previous competitions include the 2007 Rochester Chamber Music Competition (first place); and the 2008 Schubert Club Competition (second place).

An active musician in the Twin Cities, Ngam participated in Minnesota Youth Symphonies, Artaria Chamber Music School, St. Paul District Honors Orchestra, and the All-State Orchestra.

Though an architecture student, she is currently studying with cellist John-Haines Eitzen, senior lecturer in performance in Cornell’s Department of Music.

Concerto competition judges were conductor and educator Rachel Lauber and classical guitarist Matthew Ardizzone of the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance at the University of Michigan.AAP

AWKWARD, an artistic student lifestyle publication, held an artistic installation at the Palazzo Lazzaroni in Rome on December 17, 2008.

The installation, AWKWARD Dolls, featured AAP students, Katie Vogelsang (B.Arch. ’10), Sarah Carpenter (B.F.A. ’10), Mollie Miller (B.F.A. ’10), and Steve Zambrano (B.Arch. ’10) as models. Behind the scenes help came from Tammy Chuang (B.Arch. ’10), Wilma Lam (B.Arch. ’10), Ally O’Neill (B.F.A. ’10), Danielle Sanchick (B.Arch. ’10), and event organizer Savinien Caracostea (B.Arch. ’10).

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ON-TOUR: Visiting Critic Christoph a. Kumpusch’s option-studio visits Eric Owen Moss’s latest construction site in Culver City, California. Credit: Day Jimenez (B.Arch. ’09).

02 Credit: Savinien Caracostea (B.Arch. ’10) 03 Zechariah Choi, Winter Figure Skater (2008), acrylic and oil, 12" x 16". Choi (’10), a B.F.A. student in the Department of Art, was named the winner of the third annual President’s Winter Greeting Card Competition.

Choi’s winning entry, which focuses on the performing art of figure skating, was used in the design of this year’s winter greeting card from Cornell University president David Skorton.

04 HHP students during their trip to Montreal descend the steps at Mount Royal, the Frederick Law Olmsteddesigned park at the center of the city. Credit: provided.

NEWS Sam Reilly (M.Arch.

’10), Koren Sin (M.Arch. ’10), and Stephanie Michelle Vito (M.Arch. ’10), were among six teams of designers to participate in the Architectural League and Design Corps sponsored event, Make a Difference in Two Days. The fast-paced event was held in November. The 48-hour challenge was a call for architects to design and build a project that could have a positive impact on life in New York City. The teams began work on a Friday night and on Monday the teams gathered to present and discuss the completed projects.

“It was an intense weekend of collaboration among group members in which we were able to test our ideas in the real world,” says Vito. Reilly, Sin, and Vito were in New York City as part of the AAP NYC program. The students, said Vito, have “used the unique semester to really engage in all that New York had to offer.”

The competition was recommended to the graduate students by alumnus and visiting architecture critic Aleksandr Mergold (B.Arch. ’00), who also participated in the event.

Julio F. Torres-Santana (B.Arch. ’10) received a citation for innovative technology for his entry, Torre Triespiral, in the Boston Society of Architects (BSA), Future of Design: Competition and Exhibition. Torres-Santana’s project was showcased at the 2008 AIA National Convention in May and the BSA Build Boston convention and trade show in November. The project will be published in ArchitectureBoston magazine.

The juried competition sought to highlight the innovative design work of young designers and was open to graduate and undergraduate students studying architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, or interior design, as well as recent graduates. Submissions were either slide shows or video.

The judges recognized TorresSantana for his creative multimedia approach and commented, “This project is truly in the spirit of our search for innovative uses of presentation technology. The mixed use of fly-through renditions, video, and line drawing animation is highly creative.”AAP

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TWO INTERDISCIPLINARY AAP TEAMS NET GOOD RESULTS IN COMPETITIONS A conservation plan created by a graduate class in the Department of City and Regional Planning (CRP) received the 2008 Outstanding Student Project Award from the Upstate New York Chapter of the American Planning Association in October 2008.

Nine graduate students in the fall 2007 workshop course taught by then–visiting lecturer Ole Amundsen III completed the plan for the Genesee Land Trust (GLT). The client-based interdisciplinary workshop takes graduate students into the field to perform real-world planning projects, while offering technical assistance to government agencies and nonprofit organizations.

The CRP team researched the history, demographics, and natural resources of the greater Rochester region, developed a scenic resource inventory to use in conjunction with a natural resource inventory, and developed a series of computer-aided GIS mapping models to help GLT evaluate the merits of conservation projects.

The team also identified methods for measuring the success of the planning initiative and made recommendations on financing options. Team members drew on their backgrounds in planning, landscape architecture, architecture, and public policy.

“The work was excellent,” said Gay Mills, GLT executive director. “The students were great, and the plan is being utilized; it is making our conservation initiatives more effective.”

Amundsen, a member of the Cornell Institute for Computational Sustainability team that recently won a $10 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, said, “the work that the students did for GLT is the type of real-world problem-solving that piqued the interest of the NSF. Cornell students in the newly formed Design and Planning Student Group placed second in the 2008 Ed Bacon Foundation student competition, Rebuild/Revive. The interdisciplinary team consisted of undergraduate and graduate students from CRP and Landscape Architecture.

Contestants were asked to develop plans to revive the impoverished community of Ludlow, in North Philadelphia—a once-thriving industrial center that has been the focus of unsuccessful urban renewal efforts since World War II. The Cornell team’s project, “Bringing Philadelphia Back to Ludlow,” looks to attract the population of the surrounding areas by making Ludlow feel safe; providing amenities; and promoting development.

Sixty-six teams submitted proposals. Evaluation criteria included vision, innovation, creativity, and ability to devise a solution for the design problem.

Chethan Sarabu ’09 said that the Cornell project was “solid because of the collaboration between the two disciplines.” Sarabu credits master of landscape architecture student Chris Hardy ’10 as the organizer and driving force behind their success.

The larger design and planning group also includes students from interior design and real estate.

Architect and engineering students can also join.

Professors Ann Forsyth of CRP and Deni Ruggeri of landscape architecture are actively involved in guiding the group.AAP

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ECONOMICS AS IF ALL PEOPLE MATTERED LOURDES BENERIA LOOKS BACK

When city and regional planning professor Lourdes Beneria began studying economics 50 years ago in her native Spain, she hardly knew anything about the field. “I thought it was something different for a young woman at the time and I was curious about what I would learn,” she laughs. “I remember thinking that I was interested in knowing the difference between capitalism and socialism.”

She did learn about that difference and many more things too. Half a century later (and after 21 years at Cornell University) Beneria has had an extremely distinguished career, full of books published, accolades received, and university leadership positions held. But what is perhaps most important to her is the fact that she has not only had influence in the academy, but also in the outside world— for example, through her work with organizations such as the International Labor Organization, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, the United Nations Development Programme, and also through NGOs and other institutions.

“It has been important for me to be in an academic setting, but always in touch with the real problems of the world,” she says. “For me, having a foot in developing countries has been very important.

My research and consulting work in poorer countries has kept me in touch with the problems that the world faces, like poverty and the tremendous inequalities within and between countries.”

Beneria, a distinguished-looking woman who is clearly intellectually driven but also displays a graceful reticence about her accomplishments, has been at the forefront of a relatively new field in city and regional planning—gender and international development—but also more traditional areas such as development and globalization. Able to speak four languages (Catalan, Spanish, French, and English) and familiar with other ones (Portuguese and Italian), she feels at home in Europe, the United States, and Latin America.

“Planning has a physical aspect and a social aspect. I think of myself as a social scientist,” says Beneria. “But planning is a very interdisciplinary field, so it’s a place where people can come from different angles and find a common endeavor. Social and economic development is an important part of planning.”

Beneria, who holds a joint appointment with the Department of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, has concentrated her teaching and research recently on two topics that greatly affect both men and women: the informalization of the workplace spurred by globalization, and the crisis of care in high-income countries contributing to the feminization of international migration.

Informal workers, such as street vendors, light industrial piece workers in home workshops, construction laborers, and others, tend to work under precarious conditions. Many of them represent the lowest echelons of the labor hierarchy, often associated with low income and poverty. Globalization has greatly increased informal work across countries during the past decades. “Because of global competition, producers are looking for the cheapest labor possible,” she says. “In the ’70s, we used to estimate that one-third of the labor market in Latin America was in the informal economy. And now it’s above 50 percent on the average.”

Why should planners worry about the fate of informal workers? “Poverty influences the way cities are designed, where the money goes, where the construction takes place, and how city landscapes take shape,” explains Beneria. “You have to take into consideration the needs of the people where they live. So to know about work, working conditions, wealth, and poverty is very important for urban planners.”

For similar reasons, Beneria talks about the “crisis of care” in her undergraduate course on gender and globalization. It’s a crisis stemming from the increase in women’s participation in the labor market and changes in women’s social roles. As women become more educated and move into the workforce, households still must meet their needs for housework, cooking, and child and elder care.

“There are families that are squeezed between taking care of two generations—the older generation and the younger generation,” says Beneria. “Public facilities, like old-age homes or day-care centers, tend to be insufficient in most countries. People, and women in particular, feel extremely pressed and overworked, particularly when they have young children.”

Beneria has done research on this issue, focusing on Spain where many families hire immigrant women (usually Latin Americans, often married with children) to provide these services. “By solving the care needs of higher-income countries, immigrant women leave a hole of care needs in their own countries,” says Beneria. The domestic workers, in turn, meet their families’ needs by sending back large portions of their wages to those left behind. It’s a trickle-down problem that will only intensify as family size in Latin America continues to shrink. And as it does, the solutions get more complicated.

Solving the crisis of care is important, because women are participating in the global workforce at all levels. Beneria calls on planners to encourage governments and communities to address their

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needs, saying, “Make sure communities have day care centers, make sure that local schools have afterschool programs, and make sure that there are health centers nearby.”

As Beneria approaches retirement, she is still breaking new ground. Beginning in 2007, she has been teaching at Cornell in the fall and spending each spring in Barcelona, where she is a research associate at the Inter-University Institute for the Study of Women and Gender. This spring, she will teach a graduate-level version of the gender and globalization course there, while continuing her ongoing research.

She is also watching the current global financial crisis with interest. “What we learned from Latin American crises is useful to think about what will happen in many households in the United States now,” she says. “One thing we learned is that when family budgets shrink, households have to figure out what in Latin America in the ’80s and ’90s was called ‘survival strategies.’ We should expect, for example, an intensification of women’s work, especially around domestic activities to meet family needs—food, cleaning, etcetera. The corners that you cut are the ones that you can do yourself at home.”

In addition, she has a few personal goals. “I want to continue doing research,” she says, “but I also have plans to write a more personal book that will deal with the contrasts between the Pyrenees world where I was born and the other worlds in which I have lived. Plus I want to enjoy my family and friends!”

The title of this piece, “Economics as if All People Mattered,” is also the subtitle of one of Beneria’s books. It aptly summarizes her worldview and the results of her full and interesting career, one that has changed both the academy and the lives of people in the wider world.AAP

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In her office in Sibley Hall, Professor Lourdes Beneria works with a student. Credit: William Staffeld.

Kalighat Mandir, Calcutta. This temple is considered to be one of the sites where parts of Kali’s body are said to have fallen. Credit: Robert MacDougall.

Itmad-Ud-Daulah, Agra. The tomb of Mirza Ghlyas Beg. Credit: Robert MacDougall.

Taj Mahal, Agra. Mausoleum built for Mumtaz Mahal. Credit: Robert MacDougall.

Sitala Ghat, Varanasi. Pilgrims on the water’s edge of the Ganges River. Credit: Robert MacDougall.

NEWS The American Planning Association (APA) has selected Design for Health (DFH), a collaborative project between Cornell University, University of Minnesota, and University of Colorado, as the recipient of the National Planning Excellence Award for Best Practice. The winning project aims to bridge the gap between urban design, healthy living, and local government planning. The DFH team, composed of experts in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and Public health, and landscape ecology, included CRP Professor Ann Forsyth.

The award for Design for Health will be presented at a special luncheon at APA’s National Planning Conference in Minneapolis in April. Design for Health will also be featured in an upcoming issue of Planning magazine.

In November 2008, Melanie Holland joined AAP as the new college registrar. Previously, Holland was the registrar in Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and played a key role in the implementation of the new PeopleSoft system in there. She can be reached at mah10@cornell.edu.

Visiting critic in architecture, Aleksandr Mergold, published an article titled, “MERA, The Measures of the Third Way,” in Dimension, vol. 12, a publication of 306090, which is a nonprofit arts stewardship organization.

Also, Mergold, cofounder of Austin+Mergold LLC, an architecture, landscape, and design firm in New York City, presented NYC Blazes for the Architectural League and Design Corps’s Make a Difference in Two Days event. For the 48-hour activism design challenge Mergold’s team explored how to minimize location confusion for travelers emerging from subway stations in New York City.

Austin+Mergold’s AIA competition–winning concept for a storefront titled Float Lightly will be displayed at the Artemide lighting stores in Philadelphia. See the presentation at www.austin-mergold.com/work_Artemide.html.

AAP recently welcomed Brooke Moyse as site program coordinator for AAP NYC in Manhattan. The AAP NYC facility provides studio and classroom space for both short-term and semester use by AAP departments. As the full-time coordinator, Moyse is the expert in programming logistics and is a resource for information about New York City. She can be reached at bm346@cornell.edu.

“Pulled Up,” a new exhibit by Carl Ostendarp, visiting assistant professor of art, opened at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (RISD) in Providence, in February. The exhibition is a joint display of drawing and prints from the school’s collection along with paintings by Ostendarp installed on a wall mural. RISD graduate art students assisted Ostendarp with the mural.

Wilka Roig, visiting assistant professor of art, was nominated as a 2008 candidate for the Excellence in Photographic Teaching Award presented

by Center, an organization that exposes talented photographers. The award honors a high school,

college, or postgraduate teacher’s dedication.

Roig’s students noted her passion and commitment among her abilities that mark her as an excellent teacher.

In the fall, Art Professor Buzz Spector spoke at the Museum of Modern Art as a participant in a panel discussion about artists’ books as part of the New York Artists’ Book Fair. A survey exhibit of Spector’s recent work in handmade paper was shown at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Selections can be viewed at http://www.uica.org/index. cfm?fuseaction=page.viewpage&pageid=587 CRP Professor Mildred Warner has written a paper for the Century Foundation on the presidential transition based on her privatization research. Warner’s specialization in privatization also was the focus of her keynote address at the Public Services International global conference in Norway in November. Additionally last spring, Warner collaborated with the American Planning Association on a national survey of planners and their role in creating family-friendly cities. More than 900 respondents participated in the survey.

Warner was awarded the title of Full Professor this past summer.

Architecture Professor Mary N. Woods recently published Beyond the Architect’s Eye: Photographs and the American Built Environment, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

In her book, Woods explores how photographers used their built environment to capture the disparate American landscapes prior to World War II. During this period urban and rural areas grew further apart in the face of skyscrapers, massive industrialization, and profound cultural shifts.

Copies of the book can be ordered at http://www. upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14538.html.AAP

project involving three faculty members from Cornell University’s Department of Architecture has recently received a grant from the university’s new sustainability center. The Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future (CCSF) announced that $140,000 of its Academic Venture Fund awards will go to “Integrated Digital Design Environment for Sustainable Architecture” over the next 18 months.

The team, architecture faculty members Professor Don Greenberg, Assistant Professor Kevin Pratt, and Visiting Assistant Professor Dana Cupkova, along with Professor Ken Torrance of the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, will develop interactive visual and analytic digital tools to help architects model and test sustainable and energy-efficient designs at the early stage of the design process.

In their project proposal, the team described the problem and solution this way: “Today, the design and analysis of sustainable buildings requires an unprecedented degree of technical sophistication that demands a new synthesis of art and technology…to integrate architectural form-finding and environmental analysis in a seamless three-dimensional digital environment.”

“The CCSF funding will serve to develop and extend the computational tools necessary to further design work that is focused on a better understanding of architecture as an environmental practice, which Kevin [Pratt] and I have been investigating in our architectural research design studios,” said Cupkova.

“The CCSF grant, through a close collaboration with Professor Greenberg and the Program of Computer Graphics, will provide access to the programming expertise necessary to enable architectural designers to gain insight into consequences of design decisions in a particular ecology and thus inform our preliminary design and form finding.”

CCSF’s Academic Venture Fund has been designed to stimulate new, original, cross-disciplinary research at Cornell in sustainability science, emphasizing work having the potential to involve external partners such as industry, government, foundations, and NGOs. AAP

OUTSIDE THE BOX: TO ASIA AND BACK AGAIN “Beyond the Taj,” a collection of images representing the photographic legacy of anthropologist and former professor of architecture Robert “Scotty” MacDougall, is poised to travel beyond the university. The visual materials on South Asian architecture and material culture is becoming an online collection hosted by the digital library ARTstor. Faculty, students, and other Cornellians can currently access the collection and accompanying written materials through the “Beyond the Taj” website hosted by the library.

After MacDougall’s death in 1987, researchers in the Knight Visual Resources Facility in collaboration with his wife, architecture professor Bonnie MacDougall, began to identify and catalog his photographs of architecture, pilgrimages, and domestic life in India and Sri Lanka. The dean’s office in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning provided funds to support this part of the project.

Digitizing the project became the next big hurdle. In 2004, Bonnie MacDougall received a Faculty EGrant for Digital Library Collections, which provided access to multiple experts from the Cornell University Library who created and processed the digital images. In 2006, a Faculty Innovation in Teaching Award from the Office of the Provost provided funding to help see the project to completion.

Ultimately, nearly 7,000 images were scanned and included in the collection. An agreement was recently signed to allow this digital resource to be published as an open collection on ARTstor.org, making it broadly available to all subscribers of this resource by fall 2009.AAP To see more images and get more information about this collection, visit beyondthetaj.library.cornell.edu.

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\\\\\Aloi Alt Berger Bouchard Buxton Fernandez Foit-Alb Hogan Imber Jameson Lipsky Lim Manfredi Mehilli Mei Salit Siena Weill Zane The Princeton Graduate School has awarded Elidor Mehilli (B.S. ’05) the Friends of the International Center Excellence in Teaching Award in recognition of his outstanding abilities as a teacher.

The award is given annually to an international graduate student. Mehilli, a native of Albania, received was awarded to Patricia Berger (B.Arch. ’68) for a cash prize and was recognized with five other graduate students at a reception in May. A member her publication, “Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art of the history department, Mehilli is highly regarded by faculty members and his students and for his and Political Authority in Qing China,” published by deep knowledge of the subject area as well as for his sense of humor. the University of Hawai’i Press (2003). Berger was Studio Ma, an architecture and environmental design firm founded in 2003 by Christiana Moss, recognized for her novel approach to the study of (B.Arch. ’94), Christopher Alt (B.Arch. ’94), and Dan Hoffman of Cooper Union, has received an AIA art and architecture produced during China’s Qian- Merit Award. The award-winning project, PRD845, was also featured in the June 2008 issue of Archilong reign (1735–95). The award was presented in tectural Record. The firm is celebrating its fifth anniversary.

December at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art Two recent shows featured works by Claudia Sbrissa (M.F.A. ’02). The Urban Institute for in Washington, D.C. Contemporary Arts held a show in the fall titled “UP: An Exhibition of Hovering, Folding, Inflating and James L. Buxton Jr. (B.F.A. ’82) created the Wheeling Sculptures” in Grand Rapids, MI and “Utopia Is Hard, New Works by Claudia Sbrissa” was sculpture for a cover of iTowns, a regional Sunday held in Lake George in February. Sbrissa’s current show, “Ephemerality” runs through April 12, 2009 section from the Hartford Courant in Hartford, CT. at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, in Philadelphia. Sbrissa was included in a panel Buxton is an art professor at Central Connectidiscussion at the College Art Association (CAA) 97th Annual Conference in Los Angeles. cut State University in New Britain. A native of During her years at Cornell Jennifer Traina-Dorge (B.Arch. ’08) was involved in a number of orNewburgh, NY, Buxton remembers his early years ganizations, including the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS), Alpha Phi sorority, where growing up in the Mid-Hudson Valley, roaming the she served as president in 2005, and Order of Omega national leadership fraternity. Traina-Dorge purhills and riverfront. The cover piece, Hudson River sued architecture outside of Ithaca by spending a year studying abroad in Italy, as well as working as Landscape Series, is a painted wood sculpture a summer intern at Blitch/Knevel Architects in New Orleans. In September, she began working for the made in 2005. architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates in New York City.

Men’s fashion label NUMBER:Lab’s line Gkkworks, an Irvine-based architecture and construction firm, recently hired Chester Salit of athletic inspired clothes is now available at (B.Arch. ’75) as the firm’s director of operations for architecture and engineering. As director, Salit manBloomingdales’, Equinox Gym Stores, and 40 ages the financial project performance, contracts and quality of service for the company. Gkkworks other premium retailers in eight countries, includdesigns and constructs commercial and institutional buildings in the health care, educational, higher ing Kitson in Los Angeles, Odin in New York City, education, government and retail sectors.

TNT in Toronto, and United Arrows in Japan. The Joe Zane (M.F.A. ’03) was a finalist for the 2008 James and Audrey Foster Prize at the Institute company was cofounded by Luis Fernandez for Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston. The prize is designed to showcase young artists who are mak(B.Arch. ’99). See the complete line at ing an impact in the “Greater Boston area and beyond.” Zane’s work was on display at the ICA from www.number-lab.com.

November 2008 through the end of April 2009. He presented several new works that offered a playful Beverly Foit-Albert, Ph.D. (B.Arch. ’61), acknowledgment of the show’s award. Through the medium of the self-portrait, Zane explored both recently published her first book, China’s Sacred the jubilation and incertitude that arises in an artist who participates in this type of competition. Among Sites. Foit-Albert is founder and president of Foit- the works on view were brightly colored glass flowers, a sculpture of a deflating balloon that sports the Albert Associates, Architecture, Engineering and ICA logo, and a painting in Italian text that translates as “I love you, too.”AAP Surveying, PC, located in Buffalo and Albany. Coauthored with Professor Nan Shunxun of Beijing, China’s Sacred Sites documents more than 50 ancient architectural and environmental sites— temples, monasteries, pagodas and pavilions, bridges and covered walkways, caves, cliffside, and lakeshore dwellings—throughout Southern, Central, and Northern China.

Peter Gerakaris’s (B.F.A. ’03) latest workson-paper were on view as part of a group-drawing exhibition at Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los AngeIn addition to serving as the chief academic officer for the state’s flagship university in Fayetteville, les this winter.

Gaber also will hold a faculty appointment as professor of sociology in the J. William Fulbright College Ira Greenberg (B.F.A. ’89) recently published of Arts and Sciences, pending approval of the university’s board of trustees.

Processing: Creative Coding and Computational In her new position, Gaber will be responsible for academic policy development and oversight of Art. Greenberg, an associate professor in the the university’s 10 colleges and schools, as well as the offices of admissions, registrar, financial aid, Department of Art and Interactive Media Studthe libraries, the Air Force and Army ROTC units, the Teaching and Faculty Support Center, and the ies program at Miami University and an affiliate offices of institutional research, institutional diversity and education, and summer session. in computer science and systems analysis, wrote Gaber is currently the senior associate provost at Auburn University. Prior to this position Gaber the book for artists, designers, creative professerved as associate provost for academic administration and was associate dean and professor in sionals, and students exploring code art, graphic Auburn’s College of Architecture, Design, and Construction. programming, and computation aesthetics. A An accomplished researcher, Gaber has earned 25 project grants totaling more than $1.78 milspring exhibition titled “Connections” featuring lion. She has authored or coauthored 40 papers and professional reports in the field of community and art by Miami faculty, including Greenberg, and regional planning.AAP graduate students at the Institute of Art and Design in the Czech Republic, can be viewed at www.iragreenberg.com/readingfreedom.

02 01 Greenhut Galleries in Portland, Maine, presented a solo show of paintings by Jonathan Imber (B.F.A. ’72). Imber has taught painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and Massachusetts College of Art, and is an instructor of drawing at Harvard University. His work is featured in numerous public collections, including Bowdoin College Museum of Art, DeCordova Museum, Museum of Fine Art in Boston, the Fogg Museum, and the Farnsworth Art Museum.

The Sierra Canyon School, Chatsworth, California, inaugurated their new campus and dedicated the recently completed 53,000-square-foot Science and Humanities Classroom. Parallax Associates, an architectural firm cofounded by Craig Jameson (M.Arch. ’87), designed the building.

NEWS The 2008 Shimada Prize for an outstanding publication on the history of East Asian

EARL ROBERT FLANSBURGH (B.Arch. ’54) died peacefully on February 3, 2009, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. Mr. Flansburgh spent decades generously sharing his professional wisdom and counsel with the university.

Mr. Flansburgh served as a member of the Cornell University Board of Trustees from 1972 to 1987. In 1987 he was recognized as a Trustee Emeritus. He was one of the first architects to become a trustee. A continuous member of the AAP advisory council, Mr. Flansburgh was finishing his 38th year at the time of his death.

Mr. Flansburgh was both a trusted adviser to numerous deans in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and an integral part of keeping architecture alumni connected to the college.

Through his dedication and participation, he served as a role model to many young alumni and architectural students.

A successful and internationally renowned architect, Mr. Flansburgh founded the architectural firm Flansburgh & Associates in 1963.

Under his direction, the firm gained a national reputation for design excellence and cost control, which led to over 100 national and regional design awards. The Cornell Campus Store is among his many acclaimed building designs.

Mr. Flansburgh is survived by his wife of 50 years, Louise “Polly” Flansburgh, and his two sons, John Conant Flansburgh and Earl “Schuyler” Flansburgh ’79.AAP Photo credit: William Staffeld.

REILLY HOGAN WINS 2008 INTERNATIONAL VELUX AWARD COMPETITION When stepping off the plane in Venice earlier this month, Reilly Hogan (B.Arch. ’08) knew he’d won something. Why else

Sharon L. Gaber (Ph.D. ’93) has been appointed as provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Arkansas, effective May 1, 2009. Gaber holds a Ph.D. in city and regional planning.

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would VELUX fly him to Italy? But what he didn’t know is that in a few days he’d be surprised by being awarded first prize in the prestigious 2008 International VELUX competition for his project “Embodied Ephemerality.”

The project, which began as Hogan’s thesis for graduation, is a design for the underground PATH station in lower Manhattan, at the former World Trade Center site and adjacent to the in-progress Freedom Tower.

“The design of the station is focused on the experience of the commuter—35,000 of them go through the station twice a day, hundreds of times during the year,” said Hogan. “If you follow the same path through the city each day you eventually become disengaged and stop fully perceiving your surroundings. This project inverts this phenomenon, so one has the joy of experiencing a place of daily passage that unexpectedly transforms itself through time.”

In Hogan’s design, sunlight from the street level is projected down onto the surface of the interior, giving the architecture itself an ephemeral quality—re-presenting itself to the commuter through time, as light and shadow changes through the day and seasons.

“To achieve this, I’m using the primal qualities of light and how it changes—refracting and projecting it throughout the station,” said Hogan.

Hogan’s design is rooted in the twenty-first century, but he honed it by combining centuries-old techniques with modern technology to mimic, at a small scale, the human experience—using a laptop’s display as a surrogate for the eyes of the commuter.

“He developed his design meticulously with a series of physical models using small video cameras to experiment with sun angles and shadows in real time,” said Visiting Assistant Professor Mark Morris.

“Working with Professors Morris and [Val] Warke, I came to realize that light in architecture can be underconsidered—it needs to be a strong consideration,” said Hogan. “Professionally, I hope to one day build projects that aren’t just for architects, but for people that use the space and can see how it lives and breathes with changes in light and weather outside.”

Leading up to the award ceremony in Venice, Hogan joined 16 other finalists (representing 10 projects) who were chosen from 686 submissions from 244 schools in 46 countries all responding to the competition’s theme of “Light of Tomorrow.” Hani Rashid, cofounder of Asymptote Architecture, was jury chairman.

Hogan is currently a teaching associate in first-year design studio. He enjoys teaching and hopes to continue to do some throughout his career. He also plans to join an innovative design firm.AAP

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Claudia Sbrissa, The Spider’s From Mars (2008), pen, marker, and watercolor collage on vinyl, 44" x 30".

(L to R) Susanna Crum (B.F.A. ’08), Michael T. Covello (B.F.A. ’08), and Liz Schneider (B.F.A. ’08) with Schneider’s Suspicious Sheep during the opening reception for the 2008 Post-Baccalaureate Exhibition at AAP NYC in December. Credit: Alice Wielinga.

In the model for his award-winning project, Reilly Hogan placed small cameras inside the model to experiment with the movements of light. Credit: provided.

In Bouchard’s design for the St. Louis waterfront, the south space is meant to be multi-functional: the large hall can be used to accommodate markets, lectures, exhibitions, and film screenings. Credit: provided.

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Pat Lipsky Pat Lipsky (B.F.A. ’63), a painter based in New York City, is noted for her abstract color paintings. In the last few years, the compositions in Lipsky’s paintings have evolved into architectural-like structures, which are created by vertical bars interrupted toward their midpoints by changes in color that bring to mind a stepped rhythm. In addition to old master painters like Bellini and Titian, Lipsky’s pictures are influenced by the writing of Marcel Proust. She uses colors to express mood and feeling in much the same way that Proust uses words to create nuance and shading. She recently participated in the National Academy Museum’s 183rd “An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art.” Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Whitney Museum of American Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; and the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Pat Lipsky, Go Down Moses, oil on canvas.

James Siena Artist’s statement by James Siena (B.F.A. ’79) Why I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing lately.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been resisting the idea of saying no to impulses to create. That has meant some very unusual or atypical works have come out of the studio, among them imaginary faces and figures. I’ve been upset at the direction our country has gone during the Bush years (well, actually, since the Reagan years, to be honest), and the horrifying American occupation of Iraq and the new official policies regarding torture of prisoners led me to, well, make some art about it. I know, I know, do we really need art to remind us how awful the world can be? Sadly, I think we do, just as we need art to show us the great and sublime mysteries of existence.

The painting is made of loops of varying sizes and colors, all of them are kinked, just as the folds in our brains make a large surface fit into a small space. There’s too much information to take in at once, but a surety of plan nonetheless.

Oftentimes abstract artists are seen as either coldly cerebral or deeply emotional. But we need to remind ourselves when we look at an abstraction or a figurative work that it was made by a threedimensional human being with both a brain and a heart. All art, after all, is about the human condition. James Siena, Kinked Non-Slice (2008), enamel on aluminum, 19-1/4" x 15-1/8".

Hariri & Hariri Hariri & Hariri’s current project, the Stembrauerei luxury residential and mixed-use complex is BOUCHARD WINS STEEDMAN FELLOWSHIP FOR DESIGN OF “GREEN” CULTURAL CENTER Nikole Bouchard is about to see the world. A lot of it. Fifteen countries on four continents in what promises to be 12 dizzying months, to be exact.

Bouchard (B.Arch. ’06) is the winner of the 2008 Steedman Fellowship in Architecture International Design Competition. Her prize requires and funds research travel and a final report and presentation, which she’ll present in 2010, the next time the fellowship will be offered.

“The spirit of my trip is to research lo-tech approaches to sustainability in rural and dense urban conditions,” says Bouchard. “I’ll conduct an extensive investigation of various regions of our world that exemplify the reciprocal relationships between people, place, and space, and in particular, the way specific cultures utilize the landscape in a symbiotic manner. The majority of these spatial solutions incorporate some degree of sustainable methodology which has the potential to benefit modern-day architecture by encouraging sustainability and cultural significance.”

Bouchard’s winning project, “In-Situ Sensibility: Seeding the Future Growth of St. Louis,” centered on an abandoned industrial area along the banks of the Mississippi River, north of downtown. Competing architects were asked to design “environmentally sensitive adaptive reuse strategies” for the site. In her design, Bouchard created a “cultural center with an agricultural or green twist on it.” Seizing on the lack of green space in the area she looked to give a home to urban agriculture and the various people and local organizations involved with it.

“I found that St. Louis already has a developed infrastructure for things like community gardening, composting programs in schools, and construction materials salvage,” says Bouchard.

“My design helps existing organizations boost reuse of the site by providing space for a farmers’ market, a lecture hall, and meeting space.”

Developing the project was an exercise in speed, energy, and focus for Bouchard. Interested competitors are given just 40 days’ notice about the site and theme for the contest. At the time, she was working for Steven Holl Architects, so she only had four weekends to pull everything together.

“Each weekend I had one focus. The first I researched the city of St. Louis; the second was a design charette via several sketches and study models; week three I refined the design and built the 3-D model; and week four I produced the presentation boards,” says Bouchard.

The biennial competition, sponsored by Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts and College of Architecture, is open to young architects from around the world and carries a $30,000 first-place award.

The jury chair for the Steedman Competition was Lawrence Scarpa, principal at Pugh+Scarpa Architecture. Jury members included Peter Davey, former editor of The Architectural Review; Hashim Sarkis, architect and planner; Nader Tehrani, partner, Office dA; Ken Yeang, principal, Hamzah & Yeang Architects; Wilfried Wang, Hoidn Wang Architects and professor of architecture at the University of Texas. AAP Nikole Bouchard’s blog will follow her travels: nikolebouchard.blogspot.com.

located directly adjacent to the Rainberg, the oldest historic area of settlement in Salzburg, Austria.

The project’s six new and two historic structures will be comprised of luxury urban condominiums, premium penthouses, artists’ studios, an exhibition space, a restaurant, spa facilities, garden spaces, and a public waterside promenade on a five-acre site at the foot of the Rainberg Mountain. Formerly a quarry for the Salzburg Palace and city churches, the rocky site subsequently became the Stern Brewery. It is from the rocky cliffs facing the site to the south where the project gets its conceptual inspiration and provides a striking backdrop to the angular forms of the six new residential structures. Established in 1986 by Iranian-born sisters Gisue Hariri (B.Arch. ’80) and Mojgan Hariri (B.Arch. ’81), the New York City–based Hariri & Hariri Architecture integrates striking architectural forms, digital technology, inventive materials, and a social agenda. Hariri & Hariri have been recognized for their work with numerous awards and exhibitions, such as the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award in Architecture and the landmark Un-Private House exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York among others. Rendering of the Wilton Poolhouse, designed by Hariri & Hariri. Credit: Paul Warchol.

M.Construction Arthur Gensler started last fall on Shanghai Tower, a 632-meter-tall building designed by Gensler, a firm founded by M. Arthur Gensler (B.Arch. ’58). Headed by Shanghai Tower Construction & Development Co., Ltd., the project development team selected Gensler after an extensive competition between local and international design firms.

The tower’s unique double-skin structure creates vertical concentric spaces with the exterior skin enclosing atria and an interior building. The tower’s soft triangular shape rotates clockwise as it rises upward to culminate in an open-top design, reinforcing the impression of movement. Conceived as a “vertical city,” the mixed-use design includes eight atrium sky gardens, office space, high-end retail, residential housing, and public amenities. Shanghai Tower will incorporate the latest in sustainable design and renewable energy systems. The façade’s taper, texture, and asymmetry work in partnership to reduce wind loads on the building by 24 percent, offering considerable savings overall in both building materials and construction costs. In addition, the building’s spiraling parapet collects rainwater, which is used for the tower’s heating and air-conditioning systems. Wind turbines located directly beneath the parapet generate on-site power. The development is slated for completion in 2014.

Also working on the project are Thornton Tomasetti, structural engineers; Cosentini Associates, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineers; and the Architectural Design and Research Institute of Tongji University, local design institute. Gensler, a global architectural design, planning, and strategic consulting firm with more than 2,800 professionals networked across 31 offices on five continents. Competition-winning rendering of the Shanghai Tower, designed by Arthur Gensler.

Michael Manfredi Michael Manfredi (M.Arch ’79) is a partner of Weiss/Manfredi, a multidisciplinary practice that recently won an international invitational competition to design the master plan for Taekwondo Park in Muju, Korea. An athletic and cultural destination for 70 million practitioners from around the world, this 590-acre park establishes a dynamic gateway to the physical and philosophical world of Taekwondo. Three distinct precincts that represent body, mind, and spirit organize a sequence of programs ranging from the spectacle of the arena to the serenity of the healing center retreat. Linked by bridges and pathways, diverse activities and landscapes form one continuous park that celebrates the history and culture of Korea, the principles of Taekwondo, and the site’s dramatic topography.

The work of Weiss/Manfredi has been recently published in Architectural Record, Architect Magazine, Architectural Review, 1000x Landscape Architecture, GA Document, Topos, Lotus International, Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture, Detail, and in a new monograph on the firm’s recent projects, Surface/Subsurface. Rendering of Taekwondo Park.

Lucilo Peña Lucilo Peña (B.Arch. ’72, M.Arch. ’82), president of development for Billingsley Company, recently completed One Arts Plaza, prominently anchoring on the eastern end of the Arts District in downtown Dallas. The 24-story, 1.1-million-square-foot mixed-use complex had a development cost of $160 million and includes 500,000 square feet of office space, 61 luxury condominiums, and retail space. Peña worked with design architect Lionel Morrison and technical architects Corgan Associates to create a structure that contributes to the urban fabric by using a classically modern vocabulary to respond to its unique site. The project lies at the terminus of Flora Street, the central spine of the Dallas Arts District, and features a 37,000-square-foot plaza at the tower’s base. Peña is now working on Two Arts Plaza, another mixed-use project adjacent to the first, with the same architectural team and former Cornell classmates Gisue and Mojgan Hariri. One Arts Plaza, Dallas, recently completed by Lucilo Pena of Billingsley Company. Credit: Charles Smith, AIA.

William Lim The Drifting Pavilion, designed by William Lim (B.Arch. ’81, M.Arch. ’82), was part of a joint exhibition with Freeman Lau called “Nomad” at the 2008 Dutch Design Week (DDW) in Eindhoven.

This marked the first time DDW invited designers from China or Hong Kong to participate.

In explaining The Drifting Pavilion, Lim says: Nomads are always on the road; their homes are easily assembled and transported. This is the concept behind the simple space enclosed by a timber scaffold and envelopes. In traditional Chinese culture, privacy is respected; walls and windows can be made of paper. Here, the walls of envelopes are also threaded together in artistic exploration. They become part of an abstract “calligraphy.” In a famous Chinese poem, a mother threads her wanderer son’s clothes before he leaves again. Letters will be the only connection between them; the thread symbolizes their bond. Here, the thread also symbolizes the bond between Hong Kong and China, design and art, this exhibit and its Chinese root. William Lim, The Drifting Pavilion (2008).

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Weill Hall and institute dedicated in celebration of “an icon for our future” As performers in lab coats danced to “Weill Thing” in the three-story-high windows above them, Sanford I. Weill ’55 and his wife Joan unlocked the DNA-shaped gate to Weill Hall. The October 16 dedication of the state-of-the-art building for the Joan and Sanford I. Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology marked the conclusion of a day of festivities—and the culmination of years of effort.

Cornell Board of Trustees Chairman Peter Meinig ’61 emphasized that Weill Hall is the hub of a wheel of four new science facilities. The other three “spokes” are Duffield Hall, the East Campus Research Facility , and the Physical Sciences Building, slated for completion in 2012. “McGraw clock tower and the Johnson Museum are among the most visible icons of Cornell’s past,” he said. “Today we thank the architect who has given Cornell an icon for our future, and he is a Cornell son.”

The architect, Richard Meier (B.Arch. ’57), said that he sees Weill Hall as a signal that Cornell is looking to the future architecturally and academically. Cornell President David Skorton thanked the Weills for being among the most generous donors in higher education and for having the vision to know where they could have the greatest impact.AAP See photos of Weill Hall at www.news.cornell.edu/stories/June08/WeillHall/WH.html.

24——An interview with Richard Meier Cornell Chronicle writer Daniel Aloi interviewed Weill Hall architect Richard A. Meier (B.Arch. ’57) by phone from his New York office about the design of the building in relation to the campus and the community.

Daniel Aloi Is Weill Hall your first building for Cornell?

Richard Meier My first built building. I designed some dormitories for the campus many years ago, but they were never built.

DA One of the initial impressions of being inside Weill Hall is the flow of the building. There are direct sight-lines through long rows of labs and work areas and several communal spaces.

RM The labs and the offices are fairly straightforward. What’s important to me is how people get together—how they congregate, and how they see one another and interact with one another in the building, and how to create an ambience in which there is an interdisciplinary conversation. There’s interdisciplinary work, of course, but this should be a place where not only are people happy working together, but also happy being in the building together.

The great thing about Cornell—and I remember this from when I was a student—[is that] you may be at a certain college, or in a certain discipline, but you have the opportunity to mix and meet with people in all different areas, students

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and professors as well. You get a wider view of the world because of this kind of openness that exists at Cornell. That’s something we wanted to foster here in the building. The building is a place unto itself, but it’s also part of a larger area, with people from biological and physical sciences, engineering and computer science.

We also wanted to create places where people not necessarily working in the building could come together. The plaza spaces and communal spaces are really for everyone.

DA Another striking aspect is the amount of natural light flooding into the building.

RM That’s always a controversy. If you’re in a lab, you don’t want the light to interfere with your research. And it has to be sort of a balance between having natural light and looking out and seeing that incredible landscape around you, and being able to focus on your research. I’m a proponent of natural light—there can never be enough light for me, but not everyone agrees with me.

DA How important is the human factor in your design work?

RM “It’s very important. As an architect, you make space—space you move through, space that you live in, space that you work in. And that space is related to human scale.”

DA Another feature is a row of outer laboratories for equipment. Scientists say the adjacent research labs are especially quiet. Was that requested as part of the design?

RM Yes, it was. It was a very close collaboration with the people [who would occupy] the building, and a lot of input and a lot of requests that were accommodated in the design. It was a fairly straightforward, linear process. I think that has a lot to do with all the people who were involved with it.

DA How do you see your building working in its surroundings, interacting with near and more distant aspects of the campus?

RM The surroundings are a given. The buildings around it are a given; the location is a given. This is a terrific site, and really, from our perspective, it’s like a gateway to the university as you come down Tower Road, and a gateway to the buildings on the other side. We wanted to address that aspect of it.

DA The footprint of the building also makes three significant spaces around it. What do you think will be the nature of those spaces?

RM This is a building that has two fronts and no rear. Seeing the location and the site, it demanded that.

In Ithaca, the weather is such that a lot of outdoor space doesn’t get used that much. I think the area of the courtyard on one side is more protected than other spaces on campus because it has buildings on four sides of it: the field house, the two wings of Weill Hall, and the Biotechnology Building. Hopefully that space will be used by everyone at the university. The plaza space I hope

will be used for activities. The path is also a garden, so that on sunny spring days students can lie out on the lawn and enjoy it. I hope they get a lot of use out of it.

DA This is from your Pritzker Prize acceptance speech in 1984: “Fundamentally, my meditations are on space, form, light, and how to make them.

My goal is presence, not illusion.” When did your design philosophy evolve?

RM It happened over the years. My education at Cornell gave me a good grounding, but it sort of evolved as I went from tiny projects to a little bit larger projects to even larger projects.

DA How involved are you in a project once you’ve completed the design?

RM I get involved in the initial stages, during the design phase and the design development stage.

Once we get into construction documents…I see photographs, but I don’t go to the site because I don’t have anything to contribute once it’s under construction. By the time I get to say anything, it’s too late.

DA What will you look forward to seeing when you tour the building?

RM I just want to make sure everyone is happy to be there.AAP Image: Richard Meier in Sibley Hall in October during an architecture student roundtable held in conjunction with the opening of Weill Hall.

Credit: William Staffeld.

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Martin John Raub (M.Arch. ’10), Communion 2 (2008).

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129 Sibley Dome Ithaca, NY 14853–6701 aap.cornell.edu

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