AAP News 08

News08 Spring2010

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AAP has long supported a broad spectrum of creative production.

But this spring we stretched a bit further.

At one extremity is the work of the animation filmmakers the Quay Brothers, whose dark, highly particularized, handcrafted set tableaus comprising Victorian figures and damaged goods salvaged from the dustbins of “old” Europe graced the John Hartell Gallery (and whose films drew crowds to Cornell Cinema in February). At the other end of the spectrum are the smooth, graymatter agglomerations emerging with increasing frequency from the plotting chamber: sui generis, stunning forms devoid of cultural reference, unleashing unfettered spatial speculations for a newly imagined social order.

We do not embrace this breathtaking range of aesthetic inquiry simply because we are attracted to difference or lack a “house style.” Rather, we are actively staging a demonstration of exemplary practices, testing limits, and staking out the

discursive poles in the ongoing and urgent debate about the role of art and design in this moment of rapid cultural change. My contention is that the design arts and sciences taught in and advanced by the college are profound modes of knowledge production, fully at home in a research university, and urgently needed. As a college, we bear responsibility for the form of our material culture, and as leaders in the fields of architecture, art, and planning, we must be prepared to pose challenging questions and provide provocative answers.

We cannot fulfill this mission by remaining static. We need greater investment in digital media while we remain connected to direct material experience. We need a closer relationship to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and a deeper connection to our colleagues in Computing and Information Science. An

enhanced capacity for physical planning is desirable; a closer partnership with the Department of Landscape Architecture is imperative. Most importantly, we must aggressively recruit and retain the most accomplished faculty and the brightest students, and offer them the same extraordinary range of opportunities that have always been, and will remain, the hallmark of AAP.

Dean Kent Kleinman GALE AND IRA DRUKIER DEAN OF ARCHITECTURE, ART, AND PLANNING

Formal study by Chiayu Peng (M.Arch. ’11) for Couture/Cupkova MOCA LA option studio. Read more on pages 8 and 9.

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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 (607) 255–5317 aap_newsletter@cornell.edu Editor Aaron Goldweber Assistant Editor Becca Bowes Contributing Writers Daniel Aloi, Becca Bowes, Sarah Carpenter (B.F.A. ’10), Aaron Goldweber, Chris Koenig (M.R.P. ’10), Lisa Jervey Lennox, Sherrie Negrea, Krishna Ramanujan, Nancy Seewald, Sarah Smith Design Paul Soulellis (B.Arch. ’90)/Soulellis Studio Copyeditor Laura Glenn Photography William Staffeld (unless otherwise noted) Cover Street of Crocodiles decor from the Quay Brothers exhibit in John Hartell Gallery. Read more on page 2.

Photo: Robert Barker/University Photography.

News08 Spring2010

© May 2010 Cornell University Printed on Lynx Opaque, a Forestry Stewardship Council stock. Printed by Monroe Litho, Rochester, NY. Monroe Litho is certified by the Sustainable Green Printing Partnership and is an EPA Green Power Partner operating on 100 percent wind power.

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Rem Koolhaas on site

Urban design competition; CRP’s Haiti response; Planning for Marcellus Shale drilling

WORK: Seipp winners; Hartell Gallery as music box

ALUMNI: B.F.A. grad included in Whitney Biennial; Telling The Story of Stuff; Shows at Johnson Museum; National Planning Achievement Award

REVIEW: Goldsmith Lecture series; Antoni visit

FACULTY/STAFF: First McCarthy Professor appointed; EPA grant awarded; Bloodlines NEWS: Quay Brothers visit campus; Case Studies in Urban Development; Art lecture series

Visiting critics in architecture FOLIO: Art & Culture at Network Speed

STUDENTS: Minority planners visit India; Bean prize winners

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2—AAPNEWS QUAY BROTHERS CO OF ARCHITECTURE PERSPECTIVE STUDIES IN URBAN DEVELOPMEN

QUAY BROTHERS BRING FILMMAKING GENIUS TO CAMPUS In February, internationally acclaimed filmmakers Timothy and Stephen Quay visited campus for an exhibition in John Hartell Gallery devoted to their work, screenings of their films, and classes with art and film students.

Known as the Quay Brothers, the twin siblings joined Kent Kleinman, Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of AAP; visiting architecture professor Mark Morris; and Ruth Oppenheim (M.F.A. ’11) for a gallery talk in conjunction with Dormitorium: An Exhibition of Film Decors by the Quays.

The Quays use puppets in many of their films, and their finely detailed miniature sets create moody, evocative environments from found objects and reused materials, such as fabrics, paper, wood, and metal.

The Hartell Gallery exhibition featured 11 set decors from stopmotion animated films, video screens showing the films, and a display of text comprising A Quay Brothers Dictionary, explaining some of the filmmakers’ influences and a variety of references to writers, artists, composers, and art movements in their work. Each set was enclosed in glass, and some featured a large magnifying lens to give viewers the sense of moving through the space as the eye moves to take in the contents within.

“They are inspired by surrealism and montage and Eastern European literature and graphic design, and I find that very, very appealing,” said Oppenheim, who has created stopmotion films and helped install the exhibition. “It gave me a completely different experience in seeing the

films after actually seeing the objects.

They make everything by hand, and it’s just the two of them. There’s something very sincere about it.”

The brothers visited students in Lecturer Marilyn Rivchin’s introductory and advanced filmmaking courses, and discussed their creative process.

Rivchin said the Quays meticulously shoot one frame at a time for their films, distinctly nonnarrative pieces that pull the viewer along into unique metaphorical worlds.

“If you had to write a legitimate script, you’d succumb to a whole process that’s just terrifying,” Timothy Quay said.

“Animation taught us all the métiers,” Stephen Quay added.

“We learned everything from cameras to lighting.”

The Quays also visited two classes taught by associate professor of art Greg Page, Introduction to Print Media, and Special Topics: Turf: Invasive Species as Art; in addition, they met with film students at Ithaca College.

Finally, the filmmakers provided live commentary for Tales from the Quay Brothers, six short films screened on January 26 at Cornell Cinema. Cornell Cinema also showed their 2005 feature film The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes.

In addition to films, commercials, and music videos, the Quays have created set designs for theater and opera productions and an animated segment of the film Frida.

The exhibition and the Quays’ visit were sponsored by AAP. Cosponsors were Cornell Cinema; the Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance; and the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis.AAP

Timothy and Stephen Quay (at left, from left) attend an exhibition of their work in John Hartell Gallery during their visit to campus in February.

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ORNELL JOURNAL ES ON DESIGN CASE NT SOUTH KOREA ————

Jordan Crandall (right) gives a critique of Benjamin Rubloff’s (M.F.A. ’11) work during a visit to campus as part of the “Perspectives on Design” lecture series.

“PERSPECTIVES ON DESIGN” LECTURE SERIES BRINGS TRIO OF ARTISTS TO ITHACA International emerging media artists Mary Flanagan, Maurice

Benayoun, and Jordan Crandall were guests of the Department of Art as part of the spring lecture series “Perspectives on Design.” Each artist was invited to campus to provide input into the department’s ongoing discussion about how the practice of new media and technology is influencing contemporary art discourse in art and design.

Mary Flanagan, the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College, highlighted her social game design for commercial and not-for-profit agencies.

Her most recent artistic interventions include real-time performative games that are staged in several cities around the world. In these games, each player is asked to go out into the community to collect ingredients for a community group meal.

This collective community is comprised of a wide cross-section of the population, including the homeless.

In Jordan Crandall’s art practice, the areas of philosophy, science, architecture, and design converge. Using Bruno LaTour’s distributive approach to social theory, Actor-Network theory, Crandall posed that both animate and inanimate “actors” within his projects tend to material and immaterial factors by filtering and modulating a flood of data in this age of digital culture. Crandall is an associate professor in the visual arts department at University of California–San Diego.

Maurice Benayoun, professor at the University of Paris I, delivered a talk on his work in art, architectural space, new media, and design titled “Artistic Intentions at Work, Hypothesis for Committing Art.” He showed diverse areas of his practice in video, virtual reality, the Web, performance, public space, large-scale art installations, and interactive exhibitions, and encouraged students to be open and receptive to new possibilities.

In addition to delivering public addresses, each artist held studio visits with graduate students to provide one-on-one critiques.AAP Video of Crandall’s and Benayoun’s lectures and audio of Flanagan’s are available at aap.cornell.edu/multimedia.

SYMPOSIUM EXAMINES INTERSECTION OF DISCIPLINES IN NEW SOUTH KOREAN DISTRICT

Internationally renowned designers, developers, and dignitaries converged in Ithaca on April 3 to examine the recently constructed master-planned business district located in Incheon, South Korea.

The symposium, “Songdo IBD: New-City Development in the Korean Peninsula,” was the fifth in AAP’s Case Studies in Urban Development (CSUD) series.

“We focused on Incheon precisely because it is emblematic of the recent cultural and economic transformation of the Korean Peninsula and East Asia,” says associate professor of architecture and CSUD project director Milton Curry (B.Arch. ’88). “The transformation bears the historical marks of imperialism, colonialization, liberation, and the onslaught of modernization, and Songdo embraces this complex national history of Korea and its transformation into a modern country, while projecting a new future.”

Featured speakers included Hyun-Kil Choi, vice commissioner of the Incheon

From left: Seung-Joo Lee, director of knowledge industry division for the IFEZ; John B. Hynes III, CEO and managing partner of Boston Global Investors; Hyun-Kil Choi, vice commissioner of the IFEZ.

Before the symposium officially started, James von Klemperer, Robert Talby, Rick Hedrick, and Elie Gamburg (B.Arch. ’01) visited Leyre Asensio Villoria and David Syn Chee Mah’s option studio with Buro Happold, called Fabrications.

Speculative Urbanizations: New Songdo City, South Korea. From left: Lawrence Siu (M.Arch. ’10), Monica Freundt (M.Arch. ’10), Talby, von Klemperer, Hedrick, Konrad Scheffer (M.Arch. ’11), Gamburg, Pingchuan Fu (M.Arch. ’11), Alkisti Douka (M.Arch. ’11), and Asensio Villoria.

Free Economic Zone (IFEZ); James von Klemperer, principal at Kohn Pedersen Fox and leader of the team that oversaw master planning, design, and construction for most of the project; and John B. Hynes III, CEO and managing partner of Boston Global Investors, a major partner with Gale International, developer and financial backer of the project. An exhibition in John Hartell Gallery featured models, plans, and information about the numerous international companies that played a role in the city’s development.

The symposium examined the processes of creating assets and cultural value from real property; managing financial, governmental, and cultural forces and resources in the development process; implications of “new-city” development in changing the professional practices of architecture, landscape architecture, and real estate finance/development; the role of art and visual culture in urban development; and the role of economic

and social systems in the development process.

“This year’s subject, perhaps more than any prior year, highlighted the need for and result that can be achieved by interdisciplinary collaboration,” says Matthew Witte (B.Arch. ’79), who provides funding for the series.

CSUD provides students, faculty, and practitioners with the opportunity to learn from international examples of successful building projects that exemplify interdisciplinary approaches to successful urban development and design. Previous CSUD conferences featured Seattle, London, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. “CSUD is the university’s premiere showcase of interdisciplinary integration vis-à-vis urban issues,” says Curry.AAP To find out more about this year’s and previous years’ symposia, visit aap.cornell.edu/events/csud.

THE CORNELL JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE IS SET TO RE:LAUNCH The eighth issue of the Cornell Journal of Architecture, titled RE, is in production and will be published in 2010. This issue moves away from a single theme and toward a new conceptualization of the journal as a location for evolving critical dialogue.

“The world is a different place than it was when the last issue came out in 2003,” says Caroline O’Donnell, faculty editor for the publication. “It was time to ‘re’think it.”

“RE” has two main definitions: (1) meaning with regard to: as the preposition in contexts such as re: your letter; and (2) as the prefix indicating return to a previous condition, as in review, reiterate, resume, reimagine, react, redo, and so on.

Both uses suggest dialogue, criticism, feedback, and testing of an existing condition: a text, a building, a methodology. Essays will engage the concepts of “RE” from many vantage points; by revisiting and rethinking existing work, by unpacking the significance of dialogue and criticism in architecture and urbanism today, by reconsidering the sustainability of reuse and recycling, by investigating the ways in which feedback and testing can contribute to machined production, and other surprises.AAP Visit aap.cornell.edu/arch/publications/cjoa to learn more.

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While Paul Milstein Hall is being built, the Foundry has been undergoing some rehabilitation.

Construction Site as Lab: Faculty Uses Paul Milstein Hall Project in Classes While learning about building foundations in his architecture class last semester, Mikhail Grinwald (B.Arch. ’13) could walk outside his lecture hall and see the footings being constructed for Paul Milstein Hall. While studying curtain wall systems, Grinwald modeled a section of the college’s new three-level home but added one variation—a terra-cotta facade.

“As an architecture student, it’s really great,” says Grinwald, a sophomore from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “Rather than vicariously experiencing the building process, we can really see it at the time we’re learning about the more technical aspects of architecture.”

As the 47,000-square-foot Milstein Hall continues to take shape, faculty members in AAP are drawing on the construction project as a teaching tool by incorporating it into course assignments and inviting key players in its design and development to visit their classes.

“Milstein Hall has the advantage of being a state-of-the-art building not only from its design but from a technical standpoint,” says Jonathan Ochshorn, associate professor of architecture. “It’s a really good case study for students to look at. It’s not a five-year-old or ten-year-old or twenty-year-old building. It’s brand new. And students have motivation to understand it since they will be occupying it in 18 months.”

In his Building Technology, Materials, and Methods class, Ochshorn assigned his students to study the Milstein Hall construction documents in the Fine Arts Library and to draw a cross section of the building. For the final project, the students were assigned to design a new facade and curtain wall system that would be different from the glass-and-stone veneer the building will use.

This assignment taught the students how to be “creative architects” by adding something new to the design, and not simply copying it, Ochshorn says. “What happens in architecture is that there are all sorts of precedents and rules of thumb that you might find in handbooks,” he explains. “But you’re always confronted with the challenge of how to do something new.”

Paul Joran (M.Arch. ’12), a student in Ochshorn’s class, organized a site tour that was attended by a dozen students and Kent Kleinman, the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of Architecture, Art, and Planning.

“Here you are in that class, and they’re talking about footings and all that construction technology, and here was this building,” says Joran. “A lot of students get into that technical jargon. It’s one of those things that if you’re really interested in, you find fascinating.”

Joran hopes to organize another tour of the project once the steel girders are delivered to the site this spring. “Once they get the steel framework, that will make it a lot more enticing to students,” he says.

Another professor who is using the Milstein Hall project in his class is David Mah, a visiting critic in the architecture department. In a Professional Practice course he is coteaching this semester with Leyre Asensio Villoria, a visiting lecturer in architecture, and Mark Foerster, a visiting lecturer in city and regional planning, Mah has invited several key players involved with the project to visit the class and discuss issues such as obtaining government approvals and using management consultants.

Two guest lecturers in the class have discussed the city approval process for Milstein Hall: Michael Niechwiadowcz, deputy building commissioner for the City of Ithaca; and Andrew Magre (B.Arch. ’90), associate university architect and former project manager for Milstein Hall. In addition, Shohei Shigematsu, a partner with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the firm based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands that designed the building, visited the class from his office in New York City to discuss managing a global office.

“I remember when I was going through all these things when I was a student, it was all so abstract,” says Mah, a registered architect in the United Kingdom. “With Milstein, it’s very clear for them when they see this building coming up from the ground to relate all these professional practice issues and processes that we cover in class to a real tangible project.”AAP —Sherrie Negrea

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REHABILITATION OF THE FOUNDRY TO PRESERVE HISTORIC LANDMARK For more than

45 years, students and faculty members in the Department of Art have molded sculptures from metal, plaster, and clay in the Foundry, a wood-frame, 19th-century building overlooking Fall Creek Gorge.

As construction of Paul Milstein Hall proceeds on an adjacent site, included in the project is a $500,000 rehabilitation of the Foundry to reinforce the roof and add sprinklers to the 119-year-old landmark.

For the faculty and students who work in the Foundry’s studios, the project is a long-awaited step in preserving the structural integrity of the one-story grayand-white building. During the past several years, concerns about the Foundry’s roof have prompted crews from Cornell to shovel snow off the building in heavy winter storms.

“I think this gives it a new lease on life,” says Mike Wilkinson, a construction manager for Cornell’s Division of Project Design and Construction. “It will keep the Foundry there for decades to come.”

Associate Professor Michael Ashkin, one of two faculty members who currently work in the Foundry, said the availability of studios in the building was one of the reasons he joined Cornell’s art faculty four years ago. “To be given this space is a blessing,” says Ashkin, whose work spans sculpture, photography, video, text, and installation art. “Because we’re doing sculpture, we need more space,” he adds.

Sprinklers were installed in the Foundry last summer to meet state codes, but because the sprinkler piping added weight to the building, a separate project was launched in September to provide additional support for the roof.

New landscaping and sidewalks will be installed in front of the Foundry once Milstein Hall is completed in 2011.

Designated a landmark by the City of Ithaca, the Foundry is the only surviving vestige of the 19th-century complex of industrial buildings that occupied the area north of the former Sibley College of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanic Arts. Built in 1890, the structure originally housed foundry casting and sand molding equipment and served as a blacksmith shop for the engineering college.

When the College of Engineering moved south to the new quadrangle near Cascadilla Creek in the 1950s, the remaining engineering shops behind Sibley Hall were demolished to allow for construction of new parking lots. In 1960, the Foundry was assigned to the School of Art and was converted into studios three years later.AAP

Left: Mikhail Grinwald’s terra-cotta facade proposed for Milstein Hall in Ochshorn’s Building Technology, Materials, and Methods class. Above: Jonathan Ochshorn, associate professor of architecture, shows students how reinforcement is assembled within the formwork for a curved grade beam on the Milstein Hall construction site.

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Rem Koolhaas Siting

Office for Metropolitan Architecture’s Rem Koolhaas tours the construction site of Paul Milstein Hall on April 13.

In Carl A. Kroch Library, Rem Koolhaas was interviewed by (from left) Melissa Constantine (M.Arch. ’11), Jeremy Alain Siegel (B.Arch. ’10), Steven Zambrano Cascante (B.Arch. ’10), and Matt Eshleman (B.Arch. ’10) for the next issue of the Cornell Journal of Architecture. The interview focused on the influence on Koolhaas and others of O. M. Ungers—with whom he studied in 1972, at Cornell. Many of Ungers’s archived papers were out and available for Koolhaas and the students to refer to during the interview.

Famed architect Rem Koolhaas’s packed day in Ithaca on April 13 included a hardhat tour, intimate conversations with students, and a lecture to a capacity audience in Kennedy Hall.

During the lecture, “Stress Test,” in Call Auditorium, Koolhaas illustrated contrasting conventions of architecture over time—from buildings that reflect a society’s values to those that represent only their designers.

“The status of the architect has also become very problematic,” Koolhaas said, showing slides of Peter Eisenman (B.Arch. ’55) being mobbed by the press at his Holocaust memorial in Berlin, a beaming Daniel Libeskind with his Freedom Tower model, and a serious, anonymous East German architect holding a blueprint on a 1960s public housing construction site. “[In this last slide] we have something profoundly unglamorous,” Koolhaas said. “And I have to admit that being in this situation is kind of

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deeply appealing, and I find a profound nostalgia for it.”

Showing a wider image of the public housing, he said, “One of the inevitable effects of the current role of the architect is that for us, this kind of architecture has become seemingly forever inaccessible. It’s maybe an embarrassing confession that in the last 30 years no one has asked us to do any housing. And that’s not an accident.

Celebrity in itself kind of removes the architect from the more serious part of his profession.”

The lecture also focused on the American work of his firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, over the past 10 years including Paul Milstein Hall.

After the lecture, a reception in Hartell Gallery gave students, faculty, and visitors from as far away as Albany and Toronto the opportunity to ask Koolhaas questions in an informal setting.AAP

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STUDENTS TAKE FIRST PRIZE IN URBAN DESIGN CONTEST Six Cornell graduate students shared

River almost completely cut off from the city by a ring of both active and inactive industrial land. The project’s concept takes a phased approach to remediation and development. The remediation is a risk-based cleanup, remediating some, but not all, of the contamination the top prize in the fourth annual Ed Bacon Student and then installing engineering controls to monitor Design Competition in December. The competition challenged students to design and illustrate a concept for and mitigate any residual contamination in the form of the remediation and reuse of a contaminated property in polluted groundwater and soil vapor.

The city building design employs a mix of uses and South Philadelphia. opens connections from the intersection of two riverCornell’s winning team represented three different spanning bridges to the riverfront, following a central academic programs and included: city and regional axis that terminates in a riverside park. The site design planning students Chris Koenig (M.R.P. ’10) respects the 100-year floodplain with an environmental and Dan Kelleher (M.R.P. ’10); Maureen Bolton education center included in the park, illustrating both (M.L.A. ’10), Zac Boggs (M.L.A. ’10), and Lee Pouliot (M.L.A. ’10) from the landscape architecture department; flood-proof design and informing the community of their industrial legacy, how the site was cleaned, and what and Tyler Grooms (M.P.S ’10) from the real estate monitoring controls are in place to ensure that public program. The award was presented at a ceremony on health is protected.

December 8 in Philadelphia, hosted by the Ed Bacon Winning entries from six schools were placed on public Foundation and the Center for Architecture. exhibition at the Center for Architecture in Philadelphia.

“I believe our team was successful because of its A jury of architects, developers, planners, and real estate interdisciplinary composition,” Kelleher says. “Our three advisers—Senior Lecturer Pike Oliver, Associate professionals chose winners from a total of 22 designs.

The Ed Bacon Foundation is a nonprofit organization Professor Paula Horrigan, and Lecturer Jamie Vanucchi— dedicated to the vision and legacy of Philadelphia’s all provided different areas of expertise that helped former city planning director, Edmund N. Bacon to direct our remediation strategy, programming, and (B.Arch. ’32).AAP design.”

This year’s Brown to Green competition focused CRP Sponsors Its First Film Series on Grays Ferry Crescent. This former industrial site presented difficult challenges and, as identified by the at Cornell Cinema Ed Bacon website, a top priority for the students was to A semester-long film series titled Cities: ran each week and was preceded by Out ran at Cornell Cinema during opening remarks from professors from “Create modern, sustainable, urban design solutions for Inside spring semester. The series, organized a variety of departments, including this complex brownfield site.”

by Chris Smith (M.R.P. ’11), aimed to CRP, government, and landscape increase the discussion of urban issues architecture. Academic credit was The team’s design, titled Rust Renewed, began by and film in city and regional planning for students interested in introducing the “brownfield dilemma” that is occurring in and across the Cornell community. A offered attending every film.AAP Philadelphia and many other cities across the country. different film on cities and urban issues An illustrative graphic showed the nearby Schuylkill

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7—AAPNEWS HAITI CRP75

Student Consulting Firm Works to Relocate and House Earthquake Survivors in Haiti Since the catastrophic January 12 earthquake, residents of Port-auPrince, Haiti, have been forced into crowded, muddy encampments and now face flooding, inadequate housing and health care, overflowing sewage, and a lack of food and clean water.

Cornell Global Solutions (CGS), a pro bono consulting firm made up mostly of master’s students in the Department of City and Regional Planning and Cornell Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA), has been working nonstop to find ways to relocate one such camp to a better site and secure permanent new housing opportunities for earthquake survivors.

The tent camp of some 6,300 Haitians is on a football field next to the Weill Cornell Medical College–affiliated GHESKIO clinic, a Port-au-Prince research clinic working on HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis that is also currently providing humanitarian assistance and emergency care for the camp residents. David Lewis, city and regional planning professor and director of CIPA, attempted to put the matter into perspective. “Imagine 6,300 men, women, and children who have lost their homes—some of them injured and sick—living on Cornell’s Arts Quad without proper sewage, clean water, or regular nourishment,” says Lewis. “You begin to get a sense of the problems that GHESKIO has on its doorstep.”

The GHESKIO clinic asked Cornell for help via Alice Pell, vice provost for international relations, who visited Haiti in February. GHESKIO has proposed a relocation of the adjacent camp to a plot of land being provided by the government. The goal is to redevelop this new area into a permanent neighborhood. GHESKIO has asked CGS to not only help with site development and relocating survivors, but also to design the permanent settlement.

Using the information that Pell gleaned from her Haiti visit, CGS has already designed a preliminary four-phase plan for building on 1,400 plots. Built to withstand future earthquakes and hurricanes, the core housing units include walls, roofs, toilets, sinks, and a kitchen area with the expectation that residents would complete the construction themselves. The plans also include basic neighborhood amenities, a school, health clinic, and formation of a public/private neighborhood foundation to provide neighborhood governance.

Leslie Voltaire (M.R.P. ’82), a special envoy to the United Nations, has been working closely with the Haitian government to further this idea

of creating new, government-built neighborhoods and towns outside the capital. By building new civic centers including schools, hospitals, and markets in areas outside the capital, Voltaire and other planners hope to give citizens an incentive to move permanently out of Port-au-Prince, thereby restoring a much needed population balance to the country. The recent growth of Port-au-Prince had become an urban disaster, with too many people and too little infrastructure in a city positioned directly atop a major fault line.

In March, CGS presented its recommendations to a visiting delegation of international NGO officials including Michèle PierreLouis, former prime minister of Haiti and founder of the Knowledge and Freedom Foundation (FOKAL), a community development NGO. “I want to congratulate you.

It’s very inspiring, with very clear propositions,” said Pierre-Louise after the presentation. She then asked who would own the houses. CGS is working out donor-funded microfinancing that the neighborhood foundation would administer, and once the loans are paid off, residents would be given title to the land, said Frantz Seide ’11, a first-year student with CIPA and a Haitian native.

Seide adds, “As a Haitian, I am directly concerned by what happened in my country and feel the duty to transform that pain into ideas and solutions that might improve the living conditions of those affected by the disaster.” He is optimistic about the results of his team’s work. “I would humbly say that we have the capacity and commitment to contribute to improving the lives of a significant number of victims and displaced people.”AAP

CRP TO CELEBRATE 75TH ANNIVERSARY 2010 marks the 75th anniversary of the Department of City and Regional Planning in AAP. Celebrations will take place on October 15 and 16, 2010, in both Sibley Hall and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. We invite our alumni to help us in planning the event and welcome all suggestions.

Visit aap.cornell.edu/crp/75 where you’ll find the details and see a link to our Facebook presence. Contact CRP’s Sarah Smith at sbs17@cornell.edu or (607) 255-9987 to learn more.AAP Planning Workshop Helps Tioga County Group Plan for Gas Drilling Students in Visiting As-

sistant Professor Katia Balassiano’s spring-semester workshop were not only learning firsthand how professional planners work, but were also helping a rural community group prepare for the impact of a controversial type of natural gas drilling.

The class of 13 undergraduate and graduate students worked with Tioga Investigating Natural Gas (TING), a countywide community task force founded last year. The students developed strategies the group can use to mitigate the impact of the unconventional natural gas drilling expected to occur in communities lying atop the Marcellus Shale, a dense rock formation that extends from Southern New York into Appalachia.

“This kind of workshop gives the students a real good flavor of how complex planning really is,” says Balassiano, a former municipal planner in Rhode Island. “I think the Marcellus Shale issue characterizes the planning that the students are going to encounter upon graduation.”

The proposed natural gas drilling has raised water-safety concerns because companies plan to use a procedure known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” to extract natural gas from the underground shale. The process requires pushing water treated with chemicals into wells at high pressure to crack the rock and release the natural gas. The wastewater would then be treated at designated disposal sites.

While Pennsylvania has already

allowed companies to drill natural gas wells using the procedure, New York officials are conducting an environmental review before deciding whether to permit companies to proceed with the drilling.

In mid-February, Balassiano and the students boarded a chartered bus and drove down to tour Tioga County, New York, and Bradford County, Pennsylvania, where drilling has already begun.

The Bradford County planner joined the group and showed the students the gas drilling sites as well as the wind farms that have developed in the area.

“This is really fascinating to me to get this kind of perspective on what is the biggest issue in this area,” says Nathaniel Decker (M.R.P. ’11), originally from Clinton, New York. “To get that experience now and to be able to talk about it with my classmates—that’s what I came to graduate school for.”

The workshop was divided into four teams that focused on issues that reflect TING’s own subcommittees: water quality; roads, workforce, and safety; environment; and process and communications. The students in the workshop came from a variety of disciplines at Cornell, ranging from natural resources to planning and public administration.

To help pay for travel expenses and publication of a final report, the workshop received a $2,000 grant from the Faculty Fellows-in-Service Program, a Cornell initiative that supports faculty and undergraduates involved in community service activities. At the end of the semester, the students in the workshop produced 30 copies of a report discussing their recommendations and presented their findings to TING stakeholders.AAP

Top: A scene from post-earthquake Haiti.

Photo: Frantz Seide ’11.

Above: Former Haitian Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis, left, greets Seide before the class presentation at Roberts Hall. Photo: Robyn Wishna/University Photography.

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8—————— Architecture at AAP has a long tradition of engaging guest studio instructors who have contributed significantly to the field. Star architects are normally recognized widely through media attention, and therefore, whether they want it or not, have become a brand.

Here at AAP we are searching the world for significant contributors to our contemporary discourse and strive to offer our students something deeper than a short brush with stardom.

As the chair of the Department of Architecture, I can say with confidence that we are committed to research and to promoting advanced dialogue in the studio. We work to foster a studio culture that reaches deeper than the usual short media attention given to a brand name. By forging partnerships between our faculty and distinguished visiting guests, we create a studio culture that constructs a deep and long-lasting discourse between the students, the guest, and the faculty partner to foster significant research and experimentation. This partnership offers the student in-depth exposure to our world-renowned guest, who returns multiple times, delivers an evening lecture detailing professional work, and interacts frequently with students and faculty to further the discourse that has been developed.

As a result of the close working relationship demanded by this type of studio structure, the tone of each stu-

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dio varies dramatically. Differences in approach, theory, and style are highlighted and embraced by the coteachers, offering students a truly unique glimpse into the world of architectural practice that awaits them.

With the help of the guest, one of the guest’s office assistants, and the dedicated faculty member, our students are offered studios that are deeply involved in the proposed research and experimentation. We realize our visiting guests are extremely busy, yet I am convinced that the research the students have produced, the discourse that has been constructed, and the partnerships that have been fostered will make many of those guests want to return to Cornell for future collaboration. My goal is to have a guest return to Cornell for at least two years and create a body of work in collaboration with our students that is significant to our community at large. Every studio will be subject to a publication that we at the Department of Architecture are deeply committed to.AAP

Visiting Critics Bring More Than Fame to Architecture Department

Dagmar Richter PROFESSOR AND CHAIR OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

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Lively Debate in Piecelines

“Often the only way to move things forward and create something new is through considerable disagreement,” says Lecturer Caroline O’Donnell, in describing the coteaching partnership between her and Peter Eisenman (B.Arch. ’55), a Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of ’56 Professor and visiting critic in architecture.

The coteachers frequently engaged in heated discussions over interpretations of theory and methodologies of critique in their class, the spring semester studio Piecelines: The Specter of Walls.

O’Donnell felt it was a revealing and exceptionally beneficial relationship for students to witness.

“The students were extremely interested in seeing us clash with each other, because we are working with challenging and complex ideas which can have many interpretations,” O’Donnell says.

The dynamic relationship between O’Donnell and Eisenman is the result of a combination of familiarity (O’Donnell started out as Eisenman’s student, then was his teaching assistant at Princeton University, and finally worked with him in practice for a number of years) and the studio’s subject matter. “Peter Eisenman and I have many alignments and overlaps, which is why we have always worked so well together. Conflicts arise in our differing views on concept and percept. Peter advocates a

Visiting Assistant Professor Dana Cupkova knew Lise Anne Couture by reputation only until a few months ago. When architecture chair Dagmar Richter suggested that the two partner to teach a studio, “I was rather hesitant at first,” says Cupkova. “Even after some initial conversations with Lise Anne around process and approach, I couldn’t foresee in detail the dynamics of our collaboration.

Now I’m really excited and happy with how the relationship and work review process have developed.”

The project for the spring semester studio MOCA LA was a new design of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). The project focused on embracing the fluctuation between traditional and experimental use of exhibition space, and looked for ways to mesh the white-box approach of many museums with a new degree of experimentation while simultaneously questioning the role of architecture as a cultural entity within this process.

This subject matter helped dictate the tone of the partnership. From Cupkova’s perspective, it was about negotiating dual approaches and looking for areas of overlap to start from, while sharing an approach to computationally based design work methodology. “We wanted to try to understand each other’s approach to the problem and set up a critical collaborative process which would enable us to find a third new condition emerging from the two original tendencies,” she says.

The partners embraced this notion of starting with areas of common ground as the basis for their teaching approach and quickly put it into practice. After having students develop their individual ideas, they then asked them to work in teams of two and negotiate between two diverse systems. The result?

“What we saw was the students modeling our teaching partnership,” says Cupkova. “Normally you don’t see this type of mutually supportive strategic thinking until you enter a larger firm after college where you need to work in teams. But we saw it starting to emerge within the students’ projects.”

This spirit of collaboration was emphasized even further when the students visited Gehry Partners and Morphosis Architects in Los Angeles, and Couture’s firm Asymptote in New York City. The students were able to witness firsthand people working iteratively to generate new ideas from separate starting points.

Particularly exciting were the materials and ideas that came from this collaboration; new thinking and direction emerged, which would not have happened without two separate criteria as the starting point. According to Cupkova, “You start with one person’s idea and can embed another person’s set of criteria, and you come up with something completely new and usually much better than either of the singular starting points.”

“When the collaboration works well, it goes beyond reproduction of style and morphs into research...which is incredibly satisfying,” adds Richter.AAP

conceptual architecture, and my own interest is in perception and how architecture is experienced.

But both trajectories stem from a fundamental agreement that architecture is legible, that it has the potential to be read. And that is the basis of the studio,” says O’Donnell.

Piecelines focused on a site in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Around the city, 34 walls called “peacelines” were used to seal off warring factions of Protestants and Catholics in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and have produced massive scars and disruptions in the urban fabric. “Our studio dealt with the way in which the removal of these fragmentary structures can produce an architecture that is neither genius loci nor zeitgeist but another kind of specter,” says O’Donnell.

Students were asked to translate ideas from seminal texts into architectural form. “My job was to help them translate, clarify, and develop their work in our regular reviews, before they presented it to Peter and me in a formal critique. And one area that he and I usually ended up agreeing on was how well a student translated a text into form.”

The studio experience was a positive one for O’Donnell. “I can only be Caroline O’Donnell.

I can’t be Peter Eisenman, and I would not and could not teach the ‘Peter Eisenman Studio,’” she says. “But the discourse and conflict of this studio, and our own putting up and pulling down of walls has created a third zone of discourse, just like the project we are working on.”AAP

1+1=3 At left: Top: Michael Jefferson (M.Arch. ’11) and Suzanne Lettieri (M.Arch. ’11), Time out of joint: The collision of ideal, historical, and distorted grids (2010), for Piecelines, O’Donnell/Eisenman Option Studio. Bottom: Elizabeth Hollywood (B.Arch. ’11) and Kelly Holzkamp (B.Arch. ’11), System Studies (2010), for MOCA LA, Couture/ Cupkova Option Studio. Above: Top: O’Donnell (second from right) and Eisenman (third from right) critique a student’s work in the Piecelines studio. Lower left: Gillard Rex Yau (M.Arch. ’11) and Matt Luck (M.Arch. ’11), In.Completion (2010), for Piecelines, O’Donnell/Eisenman Option Studio.

Lower right: Couture (with arm raised) during a critique in the MOCA LA studio.

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Work

Daniel Marino (B.Arch. ’12) and Giffen Ott’s (B.Arch. ’13) build of Massimiliano Fuksas’s Nardini Grappa Research and Multimedia Center, for Structures III class, taught by Visiting Lecturer Brett Schneider.

Photo: Giffen Ott (B.Arch. ’13).

Above / Sehee Kim (B.F.A. ’10), Grandparents II (2009), electronically printed photography and water on charcoal paper, 18" x 24".

WINNERS OF THE SEIPP COMPETITION

Nicolas Martin (B.Arch. ’12) and Walker Smith-Williams (B.Arch. ’12) are the winners of the 2010 Edwin A. Seipp Competition in Architecture. This year’s project asked students to create a series of three maps of the Morningside Heights area of New York City, along with a physical construction mapping the site in a third dimension. The Edwin A. Seipp Memorial Prizes were established in 1948 by Mrs. E. A. Seipp in memory of her husband, an alumnus of the Class of 1905.

One or more prizes in the amount of at least $150 are awarded to third-year student winner(s) of a special design competition.

Far left / From Martin’s Changing Apertures on Morningside Heights and Columbia University, a map of Morningside Park.

Left / From Smith-Williams’s Mapping Morningside, a map showing construction, change, and renewal in Harlem.

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Below / Andrew Schwartz (B.F.A. ’10), Let It Bleed (2010), candy, steel, and heating element, dimensions variable, approximately 10" x 17" x 6".

From Oscillate exhibit, John Hartell Gallery, February 2010.

Above / With Tactile, Spatial, Musical, Alice Lin (B.Arch. ’11) created a musical composition of space. John Hartell Gallery was transformed into a “music box” installation with several piano wires strung from one wall to the next, spanning up to 45 feet in length. Each wire was tuned to maintain a distinctive pitch. As multiple people activated several tones, a unique musical composition was generated that only existed within that specific time and space. The project was part of the Daniel Libeskind/Mark Morris Option Studio in the fall.

Photo: Heera Gangaramani (B.Arch. ’10).

Above / Ruth Oppenheim (M.F.A. ’11), White-Out detail from video installation (2010), 12 8–1/2" x 11" photocopied and punched pages of The Smooth and the Striated by Deleuze and Guattari.

From the Under the Weather show, Tjaden Experimental Gallery, February 2010.

Right / Roxanne Yamins (B.F.A. ’11), untitled (2009), oil paint on canvas, 62" x 74". From Construction and Underlying Foundations exhibit.

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Folio Meta | Trans | Para Art & Culture at Network Speed Stephanie Owens “Bottlenecks are always in the middle. Being in the middle of a line is the most uncomfortable position.” 1 Much has been said about how the collapse of space and time as a result of global communication technologies has fostered a network-based society, perhaps even a network-generated society.

Less has been said about how this fundamental change in the way we communicate has challenged the value of representation as the undisputed grammar of art. At the core of the art-representation relationship is the thought that art is a sensuous re-production or “second presence” of a perceivable aspect of the world whose distortions, interpretations, and nuances form the narrative of artistic expression and stylistic historical divisions. Yet the representational balance between perception and art has always been precarious— being at some periods too textual, too illustrative, and at other periods too materially literal. But the representational impulse has remained constant even when art has been ephemeral or conceptual, since through the documentation, titles, or reviews of such work we never lose sight of the author—the authority of the subject in the subject/object equation.

termed “relational aesthetics” has moved in to fill the gap of a representational aesthetics that cannot account for the hybrid and inter-subjective experiences whose mix of directly perceived, remotely sensed, and fabricated realities are not easily parsed, were it still a critical project to do so. Often, art that seeks to define relations is an art informed by a subject in time—an event or exchange—rather than a subject in space. Within this event-based or transactional understanding of art, where art is merely one of many possible constructions of experience, the role of the artist is, to borrow from Bourriaud, “no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real.”

By extending Bourriaud’s “models of action” into the space of networks, where form is a synthesis of multiple identities, what is made is the frontier of how it is made. The real is as the real does. We increasingly rely on, and accept as a part of our reality, remote presences whose form/voice via email or text message has a corporeality that is not as much signified as deferred. These presences are not a construct of representation but of time and scale.

The scale of data visualizations, particularly those that aggregate But art built for communication networks and technologies presents use patterns or filter online behavior, shows how the contemporary the greatest challenge to the notion that art is the practice of a visual parts ways with representation as an interpretive act. It takes subject whose sense perceptions and cultural interpretations a multitude of actions, by a vast multitude of connected users, to constitute the work of art. This challenge is no longer limited to the produce the shape of our collective intention. Yet somehow this mechanical way that it can be or has been reproduced, but takes shape is more than quantitative. Participating in this vast “shaping” aim at the fundamental assumption that art exceeds its composite, casts our awareness in a peculiar form—one that is simultaneously material parts. It is this excess or separation between material and art which cannot account for the interactive, generative, and real-time intimate (private singular actions made from laptops) and distant (actions seen within the larger gesture of others), which magnifies engagements of network-based art. Often in work that has multiple our immediate perception. Through the network—itself a network users, occurring in multiple time zones and forms at the same time, of networks—what we “perceive” is not an extension of our senses there is neither artist nor artifact but merely action and context. This per se, but a hybrid of computational order and human intention kind of “just-in-time” interface, assembled at the moment and site that results in a tangible, plural subjectivity that neither precedes nor that it is requested, asserts art as something outside of the classic subject-object discourse of representation. It demands an aesthetics follows any singular creative act. of the present—an ontology of phenomenal forms and techno-social Through this immersive plurality, functioning somewhat like a distillations where we encounter an undifferentiated subject/object. material base that is manifest in myriad figurations, what is visible 1 or visual is merely symptomatic of singularly illegible political and “Grass has its line of flight and does not take root.” social formations. So much of what we incorporate into our daily For many contemporary artists and theorists, the role of art has changed in step with the liquidity of the notion of the subject and the horizontality of form merged with content. Much of what is

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Each semester, the Folio section is the province of a guest editor, chosen from among the visiting and resident faculty at AAP to provide a perspective on the college’s activities and also to offer a glimpse of his or her own interests and areas of expertise. This issue’s guest editor is Stephanie Owens, visiting assistant professor and director of programmatic initiatives, Department of Art.

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“We have grass in the head, not a tree: what thinking signifies is what the brain is, a ‘particular nervous system’ of grass.” 1 Recent theoretical and curatorial interest in transformational or phenomenal forms (“Making Worlds” was the title of the most recent Venice Biennale, and “Build Your Own World” is the current title of the upcoming 01SJ Biennale of digital art) is evidence that the practice of art is increasingly a practice consistent with, rather than separate from, the practice of life. Macro-level or meta-level engagements, where the objectives of creative aims are speculative and organizational, may be the one way to get out in front of our Although art has traditionally used material objects to produce cultural storm of images, films, apps, emails, and games which representational and subjective work, doubling of experience in this way (perception of the world plus the perception of the object that re- can easily swallow us up in an overwhelming, indecipherable sea presents that world) loses its potency when that perception is tripled, of information. In this sense, anticipatory forms or actions are not necessarily the uncritical mirroring of algorithmic computational quadrupled, and so on, until the resonance that plays between sign programs, as is sometimes suggested, but a way to work with and and signified is no longer the work of the individual interpretive against an informational tide that does not stop for or because of mind but rather the result of multiple, independent minds operating some necessary critical reflection. simultaneously. Recent art projects like We Feel Fine (Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, 2006) and earlier insights like Listening Post Network-based art, in a way that is more intentional than derivative, (Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, 2004), which form visualizations from looks to scientific, computational, and social practices as models the discreet text and media sentiments of Web users, show how often of a poetics in speculative form. But because they precede or current art creates an aggregate form that manifests the world at the exist outside of fixed notions of representation, organic data same time it perceives the world. visualization, generative algorithms, social media applications, and human computation and other forms of “live” or “real-time” digital It is this multiplied, ordered, aggregate perception—by nature interactions still pose difficult questions about the material production of its scale and reach—that conveys the possibility of art as a of art. To admit these computational, real-time life forms into the transformational form, what some have labeled an “aesthetics of 2 discourse of art, artists and educators of new media must grapple immanence.” Yet as we have lived for the last 20 or so years with art that assembles affinities and models through dialogic exchanges with the idea of an enduring present—a plotting, summarizing, conjecturing, testing, framing, filtering, idling—that operates as form rather than objects, it remains unclear how this can be translated only by giving up any territorial ownership, whether disciplinary, into a replicable practice as art. A form that is in a constant state of professional, or aesthetic. becoming resists the perimeters that would give this “becoming” pause long enough to be caught in time or space so that as art we This idea of an enduring but transformational present is in part can subject it to judgment or critical assessment. This lack of a space network art’s attempt to forge a distinction between ourselves and of critical reflection is felt most acutely in new media education, the networks we use. Contrary to those who feel we have lost some where teaching a set of inherited skills or aesthetic axioms cannot fundamental humanity with the virtualization of society, the networks be the foundation upon which to support a transmission of formal in question are not fibers of electrical impulses running independent knowledge or cultural authority. The most urgent question, therefore, of humanity, but rather the genesis and exchange of human intention, for artists and educators of new media is this: How do we apprehend sentiment, and activity. Given that 500 million people are regularly or evaluate a form that is in constant flux, not only in shape, but connected to each other via the vast, open “internetworking in content and scope? Defining an aesthetics of immanence or architecture” of various protocol networks,3 it seems clear that we becoming thus requires a liquidation of the authority of visual as are not made immaterial by the networks we use but that we have the beginning and end of the creative process. It is a call for the merely networked our fundamental materiality. And having done so, articulation and valuation of activities in the middle—the meta-, we have collectively manifested, or manifest daily or yearly in multiple trans-, para- consciousness of a threshold. ways, an architecture of our shared consciousness that conveys who we are and what we value. Or as Geert Lovink of the Institute for Network Cultures recently stated, “the network, not the church, is the dominant form of our time.”4 understanding of the world is produced by this plurality that we absorb it into our awareness as if directly perceived. This is why such immaterial, yet omnipresent things such as global warming, our human genome sequence, and vast global migrations take shape as a real part of our visual and cultural vocabulary. Given this expansive “eye,” which defines our experience as a visceral, functional contraction of “I” and “we,” artists are confronted with a new model of experience that is trans-subjective, where art practice is more culturally and aesthetically diffuse.

To view the barcodes, you’ll need a web-enabled camera phone. ____ 1. On your mobile phone, open the web browser and point it to get.neoreader.com. ____ 2. Install the NeoReader 2D

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Folio 15

“One begins again through the middle.” 1 Network art practice is a field that operates in a paradoxical way between technological or industrial institutions and a critique of those institutions. Given that most pervasive and widely accessible technologies have government origins or are products of corporate interest, it is wrong to assume that use of these technologies is to be complicit with these origins and interests. Although most consumer technologies that permeate our culture and extend human sense perception (phone, TV, fax, etc.) were generated by the same ideological matrix of interests, the information network seems to be more inherently defined by (and critiqued for) the ideological subtext of its sphere of operation. This may be because much of the standardization is still unsettled, and that as global citizens we are deeply invested in its potential to remain a neutral or “open system.”

But while it may be possible to define the future network more openly, outside of the logic of the current networking protocols it has inherited, these rules of operation have for now structured a common language of use that makes us alert to volumes, traces, rhizomes, and clouds as large patterns of activity that “speak.” In many ways, the popularity and reach of networks—scalable both horizontally and vertically to some degree—are what gives emergent media the metabolism it needs to sustain itself as form.

Through experimentation with technologies new to their time, artists have always sought to frame the social/aesthetic relationships enabled by pervasive technologies rather than simply to adopt wholesale their embedded agendas or instrumental logic. Historical “misuse” or modification of print, photographic, radio, sound, video, and satellite technologies has been one way that artists have sought to discover the underlying social desire masked by the electronic lure of the new. Degas and Monet, having to contend with the camera in their time, “produced a photographic way of thinking that went well beyond the shots of their contemporaries.”5 Artists seek essences where others seek techniques. It is therefore the responsibility of artists and instructors working with new technologies to write themselves into the system—not as a means of servility to dominant modes of industrial logic, but as a way to start from a middle space where art can supercede the inevitable trends and cycles of industry. It was the alternate use or experimentation with communication technology and optical media that inspired the Fluxus to create phone/fax events and Paik to use satellite TV to express how changes in perception are tantamount to changes in human awareness.

Any subjectivity inherent in network art is not produced by the transport of messages or media from endpoint A to endpoint B, but in harnessing, or intervening in the collective manifestation of its form. It is by making legible the limits of net accessibility—the hidden aim and goal of “free” online content, the exchange of privacy for customizable functionality, and the legacy of military war games—that existing social/aesthetic templates can be challenged and changed.

And in this act of exposure, where subject/object distinctions no longer anchor critical and cultural spaces, artists can help define the threshold where our interpretation of the world can match the speed at which it now moves.

“Not only does grass grow in the middle of things, but it grows itself through the middle.” 1

Studio Research in Middle Spaces This AAP Folio is in many ways an example of the uneasy status of the visual in an era of both ubiquitous imagery and communication media. While it is common to translate work made primarily for computers and screens into print as documentation and record, I found it impossible to relay the interactive work and net-based investigations central to my observations in static pictorial form. So it is precisely at this threshold—the middle space that neither begins nor ends the experience of the projects I share with you here—that the Folio operates.

What I hope to frame, by both the content and form of the Folio, is the shared interest in recent art and architectural classrooms in identifying a cultural and pedagogical space where art, architecture, urbanism, data visualization, imaging technologies, media, and network communication converge. Because the site of this convergence is itself emerging and transforming, the structure of new/emerging media education and its discourse must create expansive learning environments oriented less toward recapitulation of known forms in favor of experimental projects that define the contemporary social, aesthetic, and technological conditions that inform the present and future of our practices.

The Folio specifically brings together two studio courses and their corresponding projects that typify how the site of creative inquiry, as it is formalized and taught in the classroom, is reforming to emphasize process over product, context over content, as we move toward an increasingly immaterial culture. Both projects are research initiatives—one in architecture and one in art—situated within their respective departments as studio laboratories at the edge of their fields.

Art in the Age of Networks is an art research studio that investigates the shift in art practice and the role of the artists in society as a result of the ubiquity and presence of networks. Through ongoing research, technical experimentation and collaborative projects linking faculty and students, Art in the Age of Networks develops ideas at the threshold of network technologies, social critique, and aesthetics. Both this studio and the Technologies of

er 2D barcode reader according to the instructions provided. ____ 3. Open NeoReader on your web-enabled camera phone. 4. Scan the 2D barcodes pictured in the Folio.

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16 Grass Flows Project In its inaugural semester, Art in the Age of Networks collaboratively conceived and developed a network project for Google Earth called Grass Flows. Grass Flows is a dynamic visualization project that revisits the project “Grass Grows” by Hans Haacke included in the now infamous1969 Earth Art exhibition held at Cornell University.

Place studio, also taught in the Art Department, are intended as laboratories for emerging forms and hybrid practices which blur the aesthetic, social, and computational realms, often projecting the students and their work into multiple disciplines outside of the traditional discourse of art.

Haacke’s work, as well as most of the dug, hauled, poured, cut works done outside the museum, if closely read, was less about the environmental elements that came to characterize the works as “earth art” than about a radical revision in perception where nature is seen as a rational organized system. He said of his project at the time, “the shape of this mound is of no relevance. I’m more interested in the growth of plants—growth as a phenomenon which is outside the realm of forms, composition, etc. and has to do with interaction of forces and interaction of energies and information.”

Although these so-called “earth artists” were brought together by the curator because of a perceived shared interest in using elemental materials and natural processes to make sculptural works, their individually expressed intentions focused more on what they saw as a “transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture.”7 Surface Cities is a research and teaching initiative established The awareness of systems, despite the dirt, ice, rocks, and salt to study the changing images of cities in the context of a new that the artists used, was no doubt a result of the simultaneous visual culture developing around information technologies. Initiated development of human-computer interfaces and cybernetic theories

by Visiting Lecturer Yanni Loukissas and Associate Professor circulating close to the artists at the time. In the few years leading John Zissovici, both in architecture, Surface Cities is a project that up to the exhibition, Nicholas Negroponte founded the Architecture brings faculty and students together in a collective environment that Machine Group at MIT (whose projects were featured in the Software cuts across numerous fields (architecture, information science, and exhibition by critic Jack Burnham in the same year, and which later urban studies) in order to challenge traditional conceptions of the city became the MediaLab), and Experiments in Art and Technology that are static, depersonalized, and focused primarily on built form.

(E.A.T.) was founded to adhere to Rauschenberg’s call “to close the gap between art and life,” through the incorporation of technology as The idea to bring both of the studios together here was inspired an element of an artwork, since technology was thought inseparable by the fact that both studios, independent of but in tandem with from life. the other, have created propositions and generated projects using Google Earth. Although the separate studios have unique aims and It was this attitude toward perception, where experience is organized methods, both sought, through use and misuse of an application and neutralized as information, which inspired our own exploration positioned “from outer space to in your face,” 6 to point to new of how new technologies—particularly geospatial web applications cultural configurations at the overlap of information systems, human which are tied to specific locations on the earth—influence the experience, and human-computer interaction. relationship we currently have as artists to the planet, and how art in an age of accelerated economic and environmental change can reflect that relationship.

The proximity of art to life, although there have been pendular swings between the two at different historical times, is less a radical charge in our time given the depth at which we depend and use the communication technologies and networks for functioning in both worlds. Grass Flows therefore takes the entire sphere of the planet as seen in Google Earth as the site for artistic intervention. In a sense, the Google Earth browser itself is the site at which we hope to generate a sense of shared responsibility and ownership of the vitality of the planet.

Surface Cities Projects Visiting Lecturer Yanni Loukissas and Associate Professor John Zissovici, Department of Architecture

References 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

”It is never the beginning or the end that are interesting; the beginning and the end are points. What is interesting is the middle. The English zero is always in the middle. Bottlenecks are always in the middle. Being in the middle of a line is the most uncomfortable position. One begins again through the middle. The French think in terms of trees too much: the tree of knowledge, points of arborescence, the alpha and omega, the roots and the pinnacle. Trees are the opposite of grass. Not only does grass grow in the middle of things, but it grows itself through the middle. This is the English or American problem. Grass has its line of flight and does not take root. We have grass in the head and not a tree: what thinking signifies is what the brain is, a ‘particular nervous system’ of grass.”

Quoted from Dialogues II, by Gilles Deleuze in discussion with Claire Parnet, (translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam), Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., 1987.

Joy James, Mind the Gap, from special LEA Issue “Dispersive Anatomies,” Volume 16, Issue 4–5, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 2009.

The Internet Society (ISOC), www.isoc.org/.

Spoken by Geert Lovink at Spatialized Networks & Artistic Mobilizations Conference held by the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, October 2009.

Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics. © Les presses du réel, 1998.

Quote from Autometric President Dan Gordon, whose Edge (Whole Earth) Viewer visualization tool, presented to Silicon Graphics in 1996, led to the development and distribution of what is now Google Earth.

Jack Burnham, “System Aesthetics,” Artforum, vol. 7, no. 1, September 1968.

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The projects developed in this studio are preliminary explorations of images of the city informed by the ever-expanding range of (simulated) experiences that Google Earth provides. The premise underlying their production is the inverse of the one that motivated Kevin Lynch’s seminal study, The Image of the City. Lynch assumed that understanding the mental images of cities we create based on our experiences would help designers propose better, more legible cities. We believe that today, half a century after Lynch’s book was first published, our pervasive ”experiencing” of the city through its images on Google Earth already informs the way we perceive and use the city. With the expansion of Google Earth, experiencing the city first through its image will increasingly shape the way we understand and use cities, and the subsequent mental images we form. The designer’s work on the city can already take place through understanding and manipulating the images and the means for experiencing them in Google Earth. Google Earth’s constantly evolving navigational tools and modes of representation, supplemented by a densely layered strata of user-generated information, constitute a richly complex virtual experience of the city. Exposing the city’s unique structure and patterns of use in Google Earth’s gravitationless, layered environment is, like Lynch’s studies in the Image of the City, not only a necessary precondition for manipulating its image, but in fact can already reveal existing alternative images.

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From left: David Lewis, Peter Gluck, and William Sharples during the L. Michael Goldsmith Lecture panel discussion. Video stills from Insights International.

Inaugural L. Michael Goldsmith Lecture Focuses on Future of Architecture, University Curriculum

On March 1, more than 100 AAP alumni and friends joined Dean Kent Kleinman and architecture Chair Dagmar Richter at AAP NYC to launch the L. Michael Goldsmith Lecture Series, dedicated to the memory of architect Michael Goldsmith (B.Arch. ’72). The speakers and panel participants were Peter Gluck, founding principal of Peter Gluck and Partners; David Lewis (M.A. HAUD ’92), founding partner of Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis; and William Sharples, founding principal of SHoP Architects.

“Tonight we will attempt to take stock of the changing relationship between those who design and those who construct architectural works,” said Kleinman during his introduction. “We are here to learn from three distinguished architects who have authored not just projects of great originality, but who have also challenged the very mode of delivering those projects.”

After presentations by each of the speakers, they joined Richter, who moderated a discussion about the value of design-build as a tool for curriculums at universities and the future of the role of architects in the profession. The conversation, which was spirited at times, hinged on the importance of instilling a knowledge of, and a respect for, the logistics of building and construction in young students.

The L. Michael Goldsmith Lecture will be held annually at AAP NYC.AAP Watch this year’s presentations and panel discussion at aap.cornell.edu/multimedia.

Janine Antoni’s Art Explores Her Body’s History In November, Bahamian-

17—Review

Des Gaspar delivers his lecture titled “Displacement and Development Ethics: Theories and Two Peruvian Cases” in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, in April, as part of the city and regional planning colloquium.

Gaspar, an economist and policy analyst, teaches at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague.

Guest Speakers____ ___Spring2010 Germà Bel Maurice Benayoun Edward Blakely Lise Anne Couture Jordan Crandall Winka Dubbeldam Peter Eisenman Mary Flanagan Massimo Florio Antón García Abril Des Gaspar Benj Gerdes Peter Gluck Erlend Haffner Beth Harris Laurie Hawkinson Jennifer Hayashida Clara Irazabal Omar Kahn Rem Koolhaas David Lewis Carmen Madeiros Ann Markusen Luca Massimo Barbero Jürgen Mayer H. Philip McMichael Toshiko Mori Margi Nothard Shayne O’Neil Michael Osman Giulia Putaturo Stephen Quay Timothy Quay Michael Rock Wayne Roberts Dylan Rodriguez Matthias Sauerbruch Chris Sharples Francis Tannian Below: Janine Antoni presents her work.

born artist Janine Antoni, lecturing as a guest of the Department of Art, presented a survey of her career, beginning with her first professional projects after graduate school, and spanning the evolution of her creative expression. Antoni also spent time with several graduate art students giving individual critiques.

Antoni is known for creating sculptures and installations that use intimate, laborintensive processes that leave the history of her body’s interaction on materials such as chocolate, lard, soap, hair dye, limestone, cow hide, and raw hemp, often blurring the distinction between performance art and sculpture.AAP

Miss something?

If you can’t get to an AAP event, you can watch or hear many of them at aap.cornell.edu/ multimedia.

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Eight 46" LCD screens with site-specific capabilities have popped up in six locations around the college to announce upcoming events and exhibit digital work of AAP students and faculty.

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20—Student News————————— Embriz-Salgado Eng Hochhäusl Kim Watkins Young Zeltser

NEWS In November, CRP graduate students in the International Institutions course joined Professor Lourdes Beneria and Postdoctoral Fellow Marcela Gonzalez on an annual Cornell trip to the U.N. in New York City. The group attended a panel discussion of U.N. officials who spoke about various aspects of U.N. work and activities, and took a tour of U.N. headquarters. The students also gained insight into the best strategies for securing a U.N. internship or position.

Lawrence Chua, Ph.D. candidate in history of architecture, is the recipient of a Mellon Graduate Fellowship at the Society for the Humanities for 2010–11.

CRP graduate students Nathaniel Decker (M.R.P. ’11), Victoria Demchak (M.R.P. ’11), and Amanda Wilson (M.R.P. ’11); and undergraduates Rachel Bland (B.S. URS ’11) and Dimitri Siavelis (B.S. URS ’10) have been working on a DesignConnect project idea for a surface parking lot in downtown Elmira. The city received $25,000 from the New York State Main Street Program to refurbish a parking lot that is in close proximity to three other DesignConnect initiatives in Elmira—city hall, Brand Park, and Riverfront Park. The students anticipate that the confluence of these three reinvestment projects will likely stimulate a new sense of excitement in downtown Elmira and a higher-quality smalltown urban experience. DesignConnect, an initiative of the Cornell Design and Planning Club, promotes interdisciplinary teamwork and student collaboration on campus through open forums, competitions, and art installations.

Alberto Embriz-Salgado (B.Arch. ’14) was awarded the Beta Theta Phi Men of Principle Scholarship’s first prize of $500.

The American Planning Association’s Judith McManus Price Scholarship for 2009–10 was awarded to C. J. Randall (M.R.P. ’11).

Sophie Hochhäusl, Ph.D. candidate in history of architecture, received a €3,000 grant in January 2010 from the Austrian Ministry for Education, Art, and Culture to publish her Cornell master’s thesis, Otto Neurath: The Other Modern—From the N-Files to the Map. In September, first- and second-year M.R.P. students attended the American Planning Association (APA) NY Metro Chapter Biennial Conference held at New York University. The twoday conference featured a panel discussion of practitioners examining current revisions to New York City’s 21st-century goals of sustainability, incentives for affordable housing, and bolstering social equity and integration in light of a stubborn economy. Students had the opportunity to network with planning professionals including a sizable number of Cornell alumni. “Cornell alumni who work for the New York City Planning Department and other New York City–based organizations gave us a lot of advice on classes, theses, and internships,” says Su aee Shin (M.R.P. ’11).

Callie Watkins (M.R.P. ’10) was invited to speak on a student panel of experts for the fall 2009 Institute of African Development seminar series. She gave presentations on the Millennium Challenge Account and Cape Verde. Watkins also won an honorable mention for one of her photographs in the Einaudi Center’s 2009–10 photo competition.AAP

Children and other residents accompany students Ray Mensah ’12 (holding map) and Giselle Denbow (B.F.A. ’10) (to Mensah’s left) during their survey of the town of Diggi. Photo: Khaleel Atiyyeh (B.S. URS ’10).

Trip to India Becomes Village Classroom Project for Minority Student Planners Twelve students in the Minority Organization of Architecture, Art, and Planning (MOAAP) returned from a three-week winter break trip to India with a sense of purpose—to turn their field experiences into meaningful results for some of the people they encountered.

The trip was a student-led initiative that took the group to several sites, from Delhi to Mumbai.

Students spent a week doing fieldwork in Diggi, a rural community that lacks basic infrastructure and services for residents yet welcomes 100,000 pilgrims annually who travel to a Hindu temple there.

Associate Professor Jeffrey Chusid of city and regional planning accompanied the group, which also visited urban centers, the Taj Mahal, museums, and other cultural and historic sites; and met with planning professionals, architects, and artists.

“It was striking that every city had a very different character to it, a different intensity,” says Mauricio Vieto (B.Arch. ’13). “Jaipur felt more hectic; Mumbai felt more Western, more touristfriendly.”

The group’s service-learning project in Diggi, a town of 7,000 people about 50 miles from Jaipur, was conducted in tandem with local efforts to aid planning and economic development.

“We had our best interactions with people in Diggi,” Nick Savvides (B.Arch. ’14) says.

The town attracts more domestic tourists and pilgrims than international visitors, and the group discovered that the stream of visitors was steady even without cafés, hotels, or other services.

“There were very unique features to the town, some of them found no place else,” says Lola Osho (B.S. URS ’10). “It’s very well-maintained.”

The students conducted neighborhood surveys, interviewing residents about “how the town functions, from sewage to hosting people there for pilgrimages...it’s a very old place, and there’s not a lot of documentation,” MOAAP President Khaleel Atiyyeh (B.S. URS ’10) says.

The students noticed that the residents appeared comfortable talking about issues in the town that they might not have discussed with the thakur, their local leader. “I think an important thing we had to offer them was reinforcement—while you may have an idea of what the issues are in your town, it’s good to have outside people confirm that,” Fernando Montejo (B.S. URS ’10) says.

The thakur, Rampratap Singh, also went “to great lengths to prepare housing, feed the group three meals a day, and make arrangements for guides, doctors, and almost anything else we needed,” Chusid says.

The Cornell group included 10 AAP students; one student from the ILR School; and one from the College of Engineering. MOAAP membership is open to all Cornell students.

The students raised funds for the trip throughout the fall semester. Chusid and CRP Professor Michael Tomlan structured the itinerary. The group was joined in India by Ravi Kaimal of Delhibased architecture firm KCA, who “made the connection to the town, prepared the base maps and other materials we used, and spent time working on site with us,” Chusid says. Bhaskar Srivastava, a New York City–based architect educated in Rajasthan, also assisted “with understanding the region, translation, and documentation,” Chusid says.

The spring semester work, along with the material produced during the trip, will be turned over to KCA and the thakur this summer, to advance planning for the town.AAP

Food Planning Supper Club Seeks Out New York City’s Experts in Food Systems The Food Planning Supper Club, an interdisciplinary, informal organization of students and one visiting faculty member, made a trip to New York City in October to learn, explore, and network with food planning organizations. The group, formed in the fall, is comprised of students and alumni from CRP, nutritional sciences, landscape architecture, and developmental sociology.

Yelena Zeltser (M.R.P. ’10) says, “The group brings together people interested in food systems and food-systems planning to discuss related topics in an informal setting, and to explore the role of professionals in creating a healthy and just food system.”

The group’s trip to New York City included attending a hearing on Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH), a session with professors at the New School who specialize in food systems, and a meeting with Heifer International.AAP

David Dixon, For Hamza (the space where my skull will be) (2010), photograph mounted on sintra, 29" x 40".

Dixon Receives Hartell Graduate Award In December, David Dixon (M.F.A. ’10) was selected by art department faculty as the 2009 recipient of the John Hartell Graduate Award for Art and Architecture.

Dixon is an artist and filmmaker whose recent work engages issues of death and its rituals of remembrance through notions of subjectivity, identity, and authorship.

“Unwilling to limit my fun, I work as a painter, sculptor, actor, writer, video artist, and filmmaker,” says Dixon. Dixon has completed two feature films, David Dixon is dead. and Unloosened and Root. “I finished David Dixon is dead. a few months ago, and am currently submitting it to festivals after having previewed it at Cornell Cinema in October,” he added.

Before coming to Ithaca for the M.F.A. program in 2008, Dixon lived and worked in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, since 1989. He has exhibited, performed, and/or screened his work in many galleries and museums, including Sculpture Center, Antenna Gallery (New Orleans), Galapagos, Postmasters Gallery, and the Museum of Modern Art. A monetary prize is awarded as part of the recognition. Members of Hartell’s family, friends, and former students established the John Hartell Graduate Award for Art and Architecture in his memory after his death in 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

The Food Planning Supper Club in New York City. Photo: Yelena Zeltser (M.R.P. ’10).

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Chua Demchak Dixon —— m Koh Kroeger Randall Shim

Right: CRP’s Professor Mildred Warner (second from right) and Cornell in Rome Professor Greg Smith (right) discuss a waste disposal facility with Italian planners.

Photo: Kevin Chung (B.S. URS ’11).

Below: From left: Eva Schwartz, Brown University; Sasha Thruong (B.S. URS ’11), San Saba resident, Anuja Thatte (B.S. URS ’11), and Kevin Chung (B.S. URS ’11) discuss neighborhood issues in Rome.

Photo: Lauren Raab (B.S. URS ’11).

Bottom: CRP students from the Rome campus visited the Planning Department in Naples to discuss service infrastructure delivery with ASIA (Azienda Servizi Igiene Ambientale), a privatized waste management company overseen by the City of Naples.

Photo: Kevin Chung (B.S. URS ’11)

Kimberly Eng’s ColorMeBlackberry (2009), digital print, 52" x 43".

Four Art Students Head to Rome as Recipients of Bean Prize The Department of Art has named four undergraduate art students as recipients of the 2009–10 David R. Bean Prize in Fine Arts. Kimberly Eng (B.F.A. ’11), Taery Kim (B.F.A. ’11), Emma Koh (B.F.A. ’11), and Rachel Shim (B.F.A. ’11) have each been recognized as talented students of art in Europe and studied with the Cornell in Rome program in the spring.

The prize was established by Mr. and Mrs. Albert Bean ’43 in memory of their son, David Richard Bean ’71. David graduated from Cornell with a degree in government administration. While he was a student, he spent time in Europe and was enchanted with Florence, and had planned to study art. The annual David R. Bean Prize in Fine Arts provides financial support for travel in Europe, and each recipient of the prize is given a copy of Bean’s writings and artwork.AAP

Above: Cornell took fourth place in the 2009 NOMA student competition with their Hogar:Home.

Women’s Planning Forum Active in 2009 The Women’s Planning Forum (WPF), an

autonomous graduate student organization housed in the Department of City and Regional Planning, aims to promote women’s contributions to the fields of planning and development, as well as provide a forum for discussion of gender discrimination and equity in the classroom, university, and workplace.

The Cornell The WPF hosted several events during the University student chapter of the National fall semester, including: tea and sandwiches Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) with Rachel Weinberger, assistant professor of took fourth prize during the association’s 37th city and regional planning at the University of international conference and exposition in Pennsylvania, in September, where discussion St. Louis. Entries into the student competition focused on issues such as working in a maleaddressed “holistic urban infill housing.”

The Cornell entry, Hogar:Home, was designed dominated field and advice for women working and soon-to-be working in these fields; brunch for a young and growing family. “[The family’s] with CRP faculty members Lourdes Beneria, status as immigrants implies both drastic and Nancy Brooks, Ann Forsyth, Susan subtle changes in lifestyle, daily routines, and Christopherson, and Katia Balassiano, even family dynamic . …The presence of the who discussed their experiences as women in grandparents implies a cross-generational academia; dinner with alumna Beth Seward transition of knowledge and culture . …Our (M.R.P. ’07) in November; and a dinner discussion response to these conditions was to create a with Avery Ouellette (M.R.P. ’06) from USAID, house with highly adaptable spaces in which transformations and the development of the family also in November.

In the spring, the WPF hosted a panel could happen naturally,” the team’s entry explains. discussion with two CRP faculty members on Also during the NOMA conference, Nenha Young (B.Arch. ’12) was elected to be one of two job and internship hunting tips. “Our goal for this year is to facilitate events which will focus on student representatives to the NOMA board of women’s issues as practitioners in the planning directors for 2010. field and raise awareness around issues related Contributors to the design team included: to networking in a male-dominated environment, Kristina Alford (B.Arch. ’13), Oscar salary and benefits negotiation, and family Hernandez-Gomez (B.Arch. ’10), Diana Lin balance,” says the secretary of WPF, Ruth (B.Arch. ’10), James Nguyen (B.Arch. ’14), Kroeger (M.R.P. ’10).AAP Yazma Rajbhandary (B.Arch. ’12), Roberto Soto (B.Arch. ’14), Charles Williams (B.Arch. ’13), Daniel Torres (B.Arch. ’14), Mauricio Vieto (B.Arch. ’13), as well as Young.AAP

NOMAS Chapter Takes Fourth in Competition

URS in Rome: Spring in the Eternal City This spring 24 undergraduate URS students are studying urban planning in Italy as part of the Cornell in Rome program. Rome is Europe’s largest—and oldest—city! It is a literal palimpsest of urban planning—and the students are peeling back the layers—studying ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern Rome through experience-based classes. Although AAP has a delightful 17th-century palazzo as its home here, students spend most of their time at critical historical sites and in the neighborhoods where they are exploring current-day planning issues, or on field trips to other parts of Italy.

The Rome Workshop requires that students spend about 20 hours per week in assigned peripheral neighborhoods to explore such issues as public space, social housing, infrastructure services, immigrant integration, and economic development challenges. The course uses an inductive, handson approach based in part on Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City. Students emulate professional practice by adopting techniques of investigation they have studied in their first two years of the URS degree.

Qualitative approaches, including structured observation and citizen interviews are combined with quantitative analysis using Italian census and cadastral data as well as their own observations—all mapped for later sharing with neighborhood residents.

This year’s neighborhoods include San Saba—one of the oldest (and architecturally most interesting) social housing sites in Italy that reflects, in part, Clarence Stein’s Garden City designs; Quadraro, an “O Zone”—a self-built neighborhood where housing was built before infrastructure (water, sewer, roads) were laid out; Donna Olympia—the densest neighborhood in Rome and site for Pasolini’s famous novel, A Violent Life; Italia—a neighborhood loaded with private streets (gated and turned into parking lots) and an innovative time share market scheme not unlike the Ithaca Hours scheme back home; and finally, we have Gustianno Imperatore—a neighborhood where the multistory apartment buildings are tilting and cracking due to subsidence, and planners are trying to create renewed interest in social engagement in public space.

The Rome Workshop makes planning and the city come to life for the students. Even though many do not speak Italian, they can use their observation skills as planners to create useful data for the residents and learn a lot about urban planning and design in the process. Experiential learning is the hallmark of the Cornell in Rome program and one reason why students find it such a powerful learning experience. For faculty too, the opportunity to use this large city as a classroom is just great.AAP —Professor Mildred Warner, CRP

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Chris Oliver, Nail It! (2010), pine, nails, red rosin paper, linseed oil, wood glue, MDF, acrylic paint. Oliver, AAP’s Rand shop assistant, found inspiration for his sculptures in his years doing house construction using established 80-year-old techniques.

In April, eight of Oliver’s sculptures were shown in his exhibition King, King, Jack, Jack, King, in John Hartell Gallery.

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Faculty&Staff News 23 ———— — Austin Beneria Donaghy Christopherson Chusid— McGrain O’Donnell Pendall Walker Woods — Mary Woods.

Veit and Gerald Scharfenberger, in Historical Archaeology (43, 1:1–11).

A paper written by Professor Lourdes Beneria and Visiting Lecturer Inaki Permanyer, both of CRP, was presented at the Development Sociology seminar series on the Measurement of Socio-Economic Gender Inequality.

CRP Professor Susan Christopherson was a distinguished lecturer at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, for a week in November. Her visit was sponsored by the Department of City and Regional Planning, the Monieson Centre in the Business School, and the Department of Geography.

After leading the Minority Organization of Architecture, Art, and Planning (MOAAP) tour across India over winter break (read more on page 20), CRP Associate Professor Jeff Chusid stayed overseas to complete research for his text on the architect Joseph Allen Stein, as well as a chapter he is writing on the “Transformation of Delhi for the Commonwealth Games” for a new Professor Mary N. Woods was named the first Michael A. McCarthy book to be published this fall. On an earlier trip to India last fall, Chusid gave a lecture at the India Professor of Architectural Theory in AAP. International Centre in Delhi titled “An Innocent Woods, a faculty member in architecture Abroad: Joseph Allen Stein in India.” Chusid also since 1984, is an expert on American art and architectural history and theory. Since 2002 she has has two recent publications: his chapter, “Natural Allies: Sustainability and Historic Preservation,” also been working in India on a history of women was published in Pragmatic Sustainability, ed., architects as well as Bollywood cinema and its Steven Moore, and “Teaching Sustainability theaters. In addition to her work on cities and buildings, her research, writing, and curating have in Preservation Programs” appeared in the Association for Preservation Technology Bulletin ranged across such media as books, drawings, in April. photographs, and cinema.

CRP Professor Ann Forsyth has recently “I am humbled and deeply appreciative to be named the first McCarthy Professor,” says Woods. published several coauthored articles: “Is There a Role for Evidence-Based Practice in Urban “It is always satisfying when your teaching and Planning and Policy?” in Journal of Planning scholarship are recognized, but particularly so Theory and Practice (10, 4:455–474); “Health when such an honor is also for contributions to Impact Assessments in Planning: Development the broader Cornell community of students and and Testing of the Design for Health HIA Tools,” colleagues.”

The McCarthy professorship was established in Environmental Impact Assessment Review (30: 42–51); “Recruiting a Representative Sample for to support an individual who is an intellectual Neighborhood Effects Research,” in Environment bridge to the entire university and who enhances and Behavior (41, 6:787–805); “Does the Built the teaching and research in AAP. “[Woods] is an exemplary university citizen, a Environment Relate to the Metabolic Syndrome in Adolescents?” in Health and Place (15:946– resource for students, and a generous and supportive colleague to fellow faculty members,” said 951); “New Visions for Suburbia: Reassessing Aesthetics and Place-making in Modernism, Kent Kleinman, Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of Imageability, and New Urbanism,” in Journal Architecture, Art, and Planning. “We have never yet awarded the McCarthy Professorship, and it is of Urban Design (14, 4:415–438); and “Seven a distinct pleasure and honor for me to extend this American TODs: Good Practices for Urban Design in Transit-Oriented Development Projects,” in title to Professor Woods.”

Woods knew McCarthy, having contributed an Journal of Transport and Land Use (1, 2:51–88).

The excavation of a first-century-B.C. Roman essay to the publication accompanying the gift of his papers (based on his time at Cornell, his early villa led by Jan Gadeyne, an instructor for the Cornell in Rome Program, has yielded some work as an architect in Buffalo, and as a partner interesting discoveries recently. Finds include the at Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill) to the Cornell remains of a small aqueduct and a large artificial University Library. cistern, as well as traces of productive activity In 1996, Michael A. McCarthy (B.Arch. ’57) established the endowment for the named profes- just outside the villa and the tombs of two infants.

The site is located in Artena, 40 miles southeast sorship. It carries an annual stipend and is a fiveof Rome. year appointment.

The Camel Collective, an affiliation of artists, “This appointment is a beginning, not an end for me,” says Woods. “I see it as a spur and chal- architects, and writers cofounded by visiting critic in art Anthony Graves (M.F.A. ’09), has been lenge to complete publications and conferences on Gordon Matta-Clark and women architects in India as well as a documentary with filmmaker Vani Subramanian on the fate of single-screen cinemas in India. I trust these projects, now so generously funded, in some way engage Cornell and the world just as Michael A. McCarthy did throughout his life and career.”AAP

Woods Appointed Michael A. McCarthy Professor

News Associate professor of art Michael Ashkin, a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, has had several recent exhibits, including: a group show, Mean Streets, in Valencia, Spain, in February; Here, on display from January through April, in Greensboro, North Carolina, at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in association with the Falk Visiting Artist program; and another group show at the Galerie at the Remise Bludenz in Bludenz, Austria, curated by Barbara Holub and Paul Rajakovics in January and February. Ashkin also has several current and upcoming shows: his work will appear in the 11th Triennial for Small Sculpture at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in Germany, curated

by Heike van den Valentyn and Dr. Ulrike Groos, director of the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, from June 12, 2010 through October 11, 2010; and his show at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art runs through July 11, 2010.

Various articles by associate professor of landscape architecture Sherene Baugher, who teaches several classes in CRP, have been published recently. They include: “The John Street Methodist Church: An Archaeological Excavation with Native American Cooperation,” in Historical Archaeology (43, 1:46–64); “At the Top of a Hierarchy of Charity: The Life of Retired Seamen at Sailors’ Snug Harbor, Staten Island, New York,” in Northeast Anthropologist (73:69– 95); “Benefits of and Barriers to Archaeological Service Learning: Examples from New York,” in Archaeological Practice and Community Service Learning, eds. Michael Nassaney and Mary Ann Levine (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 36–58); “Historical Overview of the Archaeology of Institutional Life,” in Archaeology of Institutional Life, eds. April M. Beisaw and James G. Gibb (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 5–13); and “Introduction to the Archaeology of Religious Sites and Cemeteries,” cowritten with Richard

awarded a grant by an artist-in-residence program in Denmark called DIVA (Danish International Visiting Artists Exchange Programme). They will be in residence from August 15 through December 15, 2010. Also, the fourth issue of Camel Collective’s living archive of art and activism, C_M_L, was released in February, with contributions by Lucy Raven, Ryan Harden Brown, Joen P. Vedel, Arzu Ozkal, and Meena Natarajan ’09, along with an essay by Claudia Costa Pederson, a Ph.D. candidate in Cornell’s History of Art Department, and Nicholas Adrian Knouf, a Ph.D. candidate in Cornell’s Information Science program.

Todd McGrain, associate professor in the Department of Art, received a Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Artist Award for his Lost Bird Project, a collection of six-foot-tall bronze sculptures of five species of extinct birds. The Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation (RHCF) assists artists in the practice of their art by providing monetary support. Since its inception, the RHCF has awarded approximately $100,000 to 147 artists.

Aleksandr Mergold (B.Arch. ’00), visiting critic in architecture, and Jason Austin (B.Arch. ’00), of Austin+Mergold (A+M), are among the winners of this year’s the Architectural League Prize (formerly known as the Young Architects Forum). A+M was also a participant in “Bring Your Own Biennale: City Mobilization,” in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, from December through February.

Artist Douglas Ross, visiting critic for art at AAP NYC, is one of two recipients of the 2009 Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Arts. The $5,000 grant will support Ross’s research into textile histories, current mechanical weaving processes, and digital printing.

CRP Associate Professor Rolf Pendall was quoted in an article titled “America’s Fastest Recovering Cities” that appeared in Forbes magazine in November 2009. Pendall commented on how government cuts could affect the economy in upstate New York.

CRP Assistant Professor Stephan Schmidt presented a session for the ACSP Conference titled “Public Spaces and the Role of the Planner.”

Also, Schmidt’s article titled “Has Planning in Germany Changed? Recent Developments in Local and Regional Planning in Germany” was published in the European Planning Studies (17: 12).

During fall break, CRP Professor Michael Tomlan and Associate Professor Jeff Chusid accompanied 13 historic preservation and planning students to the annual meeting of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Nashville. In addition to attending educational sessions, the HPP students staffed the booth for the National Council for Preservation Education and spent time visiting the city’s historic sites. The group also stopped in Charlottesville, Virginia, to tour Monticello and the University of Virginia.

Visiting lecturer in art Nathan TownesAnderson (M.F.A. ’09), was a guest blogger in the fall for the popular contemporary documentary Art:21. He discussed the intersections of art, music, and celebrity in the culture of the 1960s and today. The site receives an average of 25,000 hits each month and is regularly listed among the top 10 contemporary art blogs.

Martha Walker, director of the Fine Arts Library, was appointed to the Tompkins County Public Library board of trustees in December.AAP

EPA Grant Awarded to CRP Chair Kieran Donaghy and Interdisciplinary Team of Faculty In the fall, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded an interdisciplinary team of Cornell faculty members a grant of nearly $600,000 to develop a suite of models for use in forecasting regional air quality levels. CRP professor and chair Kieran Donaghy will serve as one of the coprincipal investigators (co-PI). He will provide expertise in systems modeling of urban and regional economies. The other co-PIs include Peter Hess, Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering; Natalie Mahowald, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences; and Max Zhang, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

The project, titled Regional Infrastructure and Air Quality Planning in Light of Global Change, will attempt to represent the effects of planning interventions at both local and regional levels. Presently, most air-quality models simulate economic behavior and associated emissions on a global scale; regional effects are derived in a top-down fashion and problems of scale resolution often arise. By examining both global developments and factors at finer scales of resolution, investigators are aiming to develop more accurate projections of air quality for the northeastern U.S. It is hoped that this new modeling framework will be applicable to air-quality forecasting in other regions.

The project is highly interdisciplinary and will take advantage of various Cornell departments that address climate change and environmental planning. Implementation of the project will occur over a four-year period, with analysis of the results and report preparation in the final year.AAP

Caroline O’Donnell’s Bloodline, in Tjaden Experimental Gallery.

Lecturer O’Donnell’s Bloodline Shows in Germany and on Campus Architecture Lecturer Caroline O’Donnell recently exhibited her project, Bloodline, at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany, and at the Tjaden Experimental Gallery.

In Bloodline, O’Donnell proposes an intervention—in the form of a self-consuming barbeque pavilion—on the grounds of Schloss Solitude, the 18th-century summer residence of Duke Karl Eugen.

Bloodline engages with the “genetic” relationship between the Schloss Solitude and its “parent” castle, Schloss Ludwigsburg, nine miles away along a straight axis. According to O’Donnell, the progression from Ludwigsburg to Solitude suggests an evolution from parent to offspring in which the offspring is responding to an environmental shift.

“Schloss Solitude appears to be a perfectly ordered and well-behaved piece of late baroque architecture,” says O’Donnell.

“But hidden beneath a facade of order and symmetry, a sinister and degenerate architecture is concealed.”

So, if the Ludwigsburg-Solitude bloodline contains the potential for both formal continuity and contextual mutation, what is the contemporary third in the lineage that responds to the genetic rules and contextual deformations?

Bloodline attempts to answer the question.

Enter the barbeque pavilion. In burning its own grillholz skin as it is used, a generational mutation within its own lifetime is embodied in Bloodline.

“Genetics by definition is the study of the forces of change and continuity,” explains O’Donnell. “In designing a third object, it is necessary to understand the forces within the existing relationship: the continuities and the variations, what was inherited, and what diverged.

What is the architectural code that is analogous to the genetic code that enables a new object to be produced?”

Bloodline appeared in Germany in September, and at the Tjaden Experimental Gallery in March and April.AAP

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24—Alumni News

AAP

B.F.A. GRAD INCLUDED IN WHITNEY BIENNIAL Storm Tharp (B.F.A. ’92) was one of 55 artists selected for the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Two major institutions, the Saatchi NEWS Roberta F. Burroughs (M.R.P. ’75) has been inducted into the College of Fellows, Institute of Certified Planners, in recognition of her commitment to mentoring new urban Gallery and the Albright Knox Museum, have American planners, her pro bono services to community development organizations, and her professional achievements. Burroughs is the president of Roberta F. Burroughs & Associates in Houston. She has also recently acquired Tharp’s work. The taught urban planning courses at Texas Southern University, served as a volunteer facilitator at post– Hurricane Katrina Louisiana Re-Building conferences, and also played a role in the preparation of a Saatchi Gallery purchased Love Nothing NEPA-related cumulative/indirect impacts document that received an Environmental Excellence Award More and will be including Tharp in an from the National Association of Environmental Professionals and an FHWA Environmental Excellence Award. exhibition of drawings titled The Power of The Gallery in the Pennsylvania College of Technology featured work by Nandini Chirimar (B.F.A. ’90) as part of its Erasing Borders 2009: Exhibition of Contemporary Indian Art of the Diaspora Paper later in the year. The Albright Knox exhibition from November 13 to December 13. The traveling exhibition is an annual presentation by the Indo-American Arts Council and features 27 artists whose origins can be traced to the Indian Museum has acquired the color-fi eld work subcontinent.

AAP Shawn Cole (B.S. URS ’92) has been named executive vice president and community bank Fireplace Road. director of Vectra Bank Colorado. In his new role, Cole will be responsible for overall management Storm Tharp’s Dark Glove (2009), ink, gouache, colored pencil, graphite, charcoal, and fabric dye on paper, 63–3/4" x 109".

Architecture students hosted a party at AAP NYC in November to celebrate the 75th birthday of architect Richard Meier (B.Arch. ’57). The party featured white cakes, symbolic of the architect’s signature design AAP color.

of Vectra’s Colorado retail and business-banking operations. Vectra Bank is a unit of Salt Lake City– based Zions Bancorp.

Perkins + Will, the firm of Robert Goodwin (B.Arch. ’84), won the National Building Museum 2010 Honor Award for its commitment to civic innovation in design, construction, and education.

AARRIS Architects recently won the prestigious Honor in Design Excellence Award from the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), for the African Burial Ground National Monument (ABGNM). Nicole Hollant-Denis (B.Arch. ’89) is a principal in the firm.

Zhao-Jing Huang (M.R.P. ’08) was appointed project manager of the European Commission’s Switch-Asia project in postdisaster Sichuan. The four-year, $2.5 million grant aims to enhance ecofriendly, pro-poor bamboo production supply chains to support post-earthquake reconstruction efforts.

Bryant Lu (B.Arch. ’98), vice chairman of the architectural firm Ronald Lu & Partners, received two awards, the AIA Hong Kong 2009 Honor Award for Interiors, and China’s Most Successful Awards 2009, for the Lake Dragon Residential Development Sales Office project in Guangzhou, China.

The World Association of Chinese Architects gave a 2009 Design Award to another Ronald Lu & Partners project, the Hong Kong YWCA Guesthouse Facilities. Ronald Lu & Partners also cohosted a September 2009 event featuring Dean Kent Kleinman. More than 40 alumni attended Dean Kleinman’s talk on “Artists Assault Mies: The Curious Tale of Haus Esters and Haus Lange.” The event was cohosted by the Cornell Club of Hong Kong and the AIA Hong Kong.

The Affordable Housing Alliance has appointed Tim McCorry (B.Arch. ’76) as director of capital projects and construction. McCorry has 30 years of professional experience in design and project management, with an emphasis on affordable and special needs housing, energy conservation, renewable energy resources, and the performing arts.

Anthony Piermarini (B.Arch. ’97) has been chosen as one of the nine recipients of the 2010 AIA Young Architects Award. This award honors individuals who have shown exceptional leadership and made significant contributions to the profession early in their careers. Piermarini is a founding principal of Studio Luz Architects (SLA), a practice that strives to link social responsibility and sustainable construction practices with built material expression. SLA has garnered many awards, including being named one of Architectural Record’s Design Vanguards in 2006. Piermarini is a critic at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he teaches courses on representation.

Michael A. Rantilla’s (B.Arch. ’96) recent house project in North Carolina has won the 2009 AIA North Carolina Honor Award, as well as the 2009 AIA SAR (North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia) Honor Award. The same project has received coverage in Azure Magazine (Canada), Metalmag, L’Arca Magazine (Italy), and CASA Magazine (Brazil).

Ohio Governor Ted Strickland appointed Elwin Robison (Ph.D. HAUD ’85) to the Ohio Historic Site Preservation Advisory Board in October. Robison is a professor in the School of Architecture and Environmental Design at Kent State University. He is also a senior associate at the architecture and engineering firm of Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates.

Rodriguez Studio was featured in the design section of the April 2009 issue of Architectural Record. Carlos M. Rodriguez Infanzón (B.Arch. ’99) is the founder and principal of the New York City–based firm.

The work of Claudia Sbrissa (M.F.A. ’02) was featured in two shows recently. Uncommon Threads was on display in November and December in the Walsh Gallery in South Orange, New Jersey, and The Exquisite Corpse was on display from November 2009 through April 8, 2010 at Paul Robeson Galleries in Newark, New Jersey.

As part of the Burnham Plan 100 Centennial celebration in October, Kristen Schaffer (Ph.D. HAUD ’93) presented her research into Daniel H. Burnham’s original draft of the 1909 Plan of Chicago. A leading Burnham scholar, Schaffer is the author of Daniel H. Burnham: Visionary Architect.

Schaffer teaches History of Architecture and Urbanism at North Carolina State University. She is among the historians appearing in the recently released film by Archimedia Workshop, Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City.

Recently, former architecture student Jacob Slevin and his group Designer Pages hosted a number of networking events focused on products and people in architecture and design. The events featured Todd Schliemann (B.Arch. ’79), Shawn Brown (M.Arch. ’05), Mustafa Abadan (B.Arch. ’81, M.Arch. ’84), Dan Kaplan (B.Arch. ’84), Scott Johnson (B.Arch. ’84), and Marianne Kwok (B.Arch. ’85).

BOP: The North Star, a new play by Emilie Blum Stark-Menneg (B.F.A. ’06), was performed at the Kitchen Theater in Ithaca in October. BOP is based on the work of local poet and Cornell associate professor of English Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. The poems used in the show are from Van CliefStefanon’s new book Open Interval, which was recently short-listed for the National Book Award.

A January story in the Religious News Service featured an interview with Andrea Strongwater (B.F.A. ’70). The interview focused on Strongwater’s work The Lost Synagogues of Europe, a series of paintings that re-creates some of the historic houses of worship destroyed by the Nazis.

Daniel R. Tindall (B.Arch. ’71) has been promoted to vice president at KPS Group in Birmingham, Alabama. KPS Group, Inc. is a design practice with offices in Birmingham and Atlanta, offering architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, planning, and urban design to business, institutional, and government clients around the southeast.

In February, Ben Uyeda (M.Arch. ’05) delivered a lecture titled “Designing the Difference” as part of the University of Rhode Island’s Landscape Architecture Lecture Series. Uyeda is the chief architectural officer of FreeGreen, a Boston-based design firm working to design low-cost housing as a sustainable option.

Jim Zver’s (M.F.A. ’69) photograph, Low Tide at Flat Rock #2, was on display in the Works on Paper, Beginnings exhibit at the Brand Library Art Galleries, Glendale, California, in September and October. The juror for this exhibit was internationally known artist Ruth Weisberg, Dean of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California.AAP

Photo: Michael Moyer/AAP.

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25 Photo: Eros Hoagland/Redux.

The Story of Stuff started as a way for Leonard to share what she had learned and experienced in her travels through the third world while working for Greenpeace after leaving Cornell. She worked for 10 years on a campaign to stop the export of waste from rich to poor countries, and along the way saw the factories where our “stuff” is made, and the dumps where it eventually ends up.

She spent time with garment workers in Haiti and survivors of the Union Carbide disaster in Activist and filmmaker Bhopal, India. She said she visited communities Annie Leonard has made a career out of her that had lost their water supplies, health, and self-professed passion for garbage. She has livelihood to industrial pollution, and realized that traveled to more than 40 countries studying the consumption habits of wealthier countries waste disposal, attended hundreds of “garbage conferences,” and can often be found on a photo were partially to blame.

“You can’t look at your stuff the same way shoot with piles of trash. Cornell University, where after that,” Leonard says. “When I came back to Leonard studied regional planning in the 90s, the U.S., I wanted to share what I had learned, didn’t impart Leonard with her unusual passion, but she said it gave her the intellectual framework and get people to think systemically. But I didn’t want to be preachy, I didn’t think that would that enabled her to funnel that interest into be helpful,” she adds. “It’s not our fault as political activism. individuals. Rather it’s about an entire economic As an undergraduate at Barnard College model based on using toxic chemicals and in New York City, Leonard said she became making disposable stuff.” interested in garbage after walking by enormous The Story of Stuff started as a live, hour-long piles of trash every day on her way to class—they would disappear by the time she passed by again presentation that Leonard gave around the world at schools and conferences. “People thought it on her way home. She began to riffle through those piles, and discovered they were mostly filled was really funny and enlightening, and kept asking for me to make a movie out of it,” Leonard says. with paper—paper from the trees she grew up It took a few years for that to happen, but around in her native Pacific Northwest. Seeing the connection between where something began and Leonard finally took a copy of her performance where it eventually ended up sparked a passion in to a film production company in Berkeley, California, called Free Range Studios. The result Leonard. was a 20-minute video that was meant for DVD It was at graduate school at Cornell, as a distribution, and so far it has sold about 7,000 student in the Department of City and Regional Planning, that she decided the real way she could DVDs. Its real success, however, has been online, where it was launched in December 2007. make change was through political activism.

“We had no idea how popular it would “I took one environmental law class, and be—20-minute things do not go viral,” Leonard I was so turned off by the way courts made says. She thought success would mean a total of decisions based on precedent rather than what’s 50,000 hits, but as it turned out, they would get correct,” Leonard says. that number in a day. It has now garnered about Politics, however, she found appealing, and 7.3 million views across 223 countries.

CRP Professor Dick Booth became a particular Leonard says that people come up to her inspiration to her. Cornell also allowed her to take courses outside of her department, and within the and tell her that they have been working on some Department of Natural Resources in the College of piece of the subjects dealt with in The Story of Stuff for 20 years and never stopped to think Agriculture and Life Sciences she found another about how that piece is part of a broader system. inspiration in Barbara Knuth, professor of natural “It’s a lot more intimidating to look at bigger resources and cosenior associate dean in CALS. systems, and there are more academic rewards “They both gave me my most important assignments,” she says. “One was to write a long for being a super-specialist, so I understand the pressure to be more reductionist,” she says. paper arguing a position—mine was about public The whole point of The Story of Stuff, lands management. Then we had to write a twohowever, is to show how much connection there page paper arguing the same position. I thought is between our consumption of material goods, that was such a great assignment! That helped our emotional well-being, global pollution, me understand that you cannot have someone’s and exploitation of third-world workers, she attention for 20 pages,” Leonard says. explains. The film aims to simplify the devastating Study in CRP also taught Leonard to look effects that our everyday lifestyles have on at cities as part of a larger system, a concept the environment and humanity. One particular that ultimately became the foundation of her revelation is that of planned obsolescence, by 20-minute animated video called The Story of which loads of consumer goods are actually built Stuff. The video has catapulted Leonard into the for imminent destruction. Leonard estimates that limelight due to its unprecedented popularity 99 percent of consumer goods are out of use six achieved when it “went viral” online.

CRP Alumna Annie Leonard Tells The Story of Stuff

Karl Umlauf (M.F.A. ’63) was invited to exhibit a retrospective selection of his work from the past 50 years at numerous art centers and museums located in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Michigan. A 210page monograph representing the full range of his life’s work was published to accompany the selection, which is represented in over 100 public collections, including the Dallas Museum, the New Orleans Museum, the Joslyn Art Museum, the Fogg Art Museum, the Roswell Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of AAP Modern Art.

months after purchase.

The film is not without its detractors, including Glenn Beck of Fox News, who characterized Leonard as someone trying to indoctrinate children into Marxism. It has also caused controversy at some schools where teachers have shown the video to their class, only to be reprimanded later by their school board. Most feedback is overwhelmingly positive, however.

A professor at Oxford University has told Leonard that he uses the video in all of his economics classes.

Whether it’s loved or despised, Leonard is happy if it inspires discussion, and she plans to keep on working to inspire others.

In March, Leonard’s The Story of Stuff book was published by Simon & Schuster. It examines more deeply the issues covered in the film, and also includes anecdotes from her travels around the world, as well as examples of positive changes that individuals and societies are making.

Plans are also underway for more The Story of… films, including bottled water, carbon trading, cosmetics, and electronics.

Leonard also keeps busy with other trashrelated activism. She recently attended a conference in Egypt about the Zebbaline, an underclass of mainly Coptic Christians who make their living collecting and disposing of Cairo’s trash, essentially providing a municipal service for which they do not get paid. They feed organic waste to their pigs and sort out other materials either for reuse or for sale as scrap, recycling about 80 percent of the garbage they collect, Leonard says. Their whole livelihood has come under threat, however, from the government-led slaughter of all pigs during the recent swine flu scare, as well as attempts by foreign corporations to privatize sanitation services.

Leonard remains hopeful, as always. The Zebbaline, as well as similar groups across Karl Umlauf, Northern Plains Overview, mixed media on wood, India and other poor nations, are “organizing, 60" x 40". Courtesy of the Fort Worth Art Center, Texas. unionizing, and getting recognized,” Leonard says AAP with optimism.

—Nancy Seewald

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Jury and Siena Featured at Johnson Museum of Art Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art hosted exhibitions of two AAP art alumni in the winter of 2010. Sam Jury’s (M.F.A. ’98) Forever Is Never was on display from January to March, and James Siena’s (B.F.A. ’79) From the Studio was up from January to mid-April.

Since graduating from Cornell, Jury has predominantly worked with photography and video. Interested in the gaps and fissures between moving and still images, Jury explores how they mediate between reality and imagination. Forever Is Never is about constructing, deconstructing, and manipulating the photographic image, and Jury creates animated portraits that are no one and everyone all at once.

James Siena is the 2009–10 recipient of the Eissner Artist of the Year Award from the Cornell Council for the Arts. Best known for densely patterned paintings, gouaches, and drawings that are based on self-imposed rules and systems, Siena’s work has been exhibited in over 100 solo and group shows, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial. From the Studio includes paintings and drawings that Siena has not wanted to part with as well as works by contemporaries he has traded for and bought, such as Mark Lombardi, Alan Saret, and Charles Seliger.AAP Sam Jury, still from Forever Is Never (2007), single-channel video projection, silent (6 minutes).

Photo: Jason Koski/University Photography.

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28—Alumni News Clough-Riquelme Wins National Planning Achievement Award The American Planning Association (APA) has recognized Jane Clough-Riquelme (M.R.P. ’92) as the APA Davidoff Award Winner for Advancing Diversity and Social Change for her critical work as a tribal liaison for the 17 federally recognized tribal nations in the San Diego area.

The Reservation Transportation Authority (RTA), a nonprofit intertribal government agency, has been working with the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) to strengthen connections and tribal involvement in regional and transportation planning. Clough-Riquelme has been instrumental in facilitating the cooperative efforts of the tribal nations in the regional planning process.

“I’m deeply moved and honored that the RTA nominated me as a way of thanking me for my efforts. It is an unbelievable honor to have been chosen from among my peers in the planning profession for this important award at a national level. Most importantly, this award really isn’t mine but rather a tribute to the collaborative planning that SANDAG and the Tribal Nations in the region have been undertaking over the last few years. Hopefully, the exposure will serve as a catalyst for other regions to follow suit,” remarks Clough-Riquelme.

Clough-Riquelme’s work has resulted in the increased mobility of tribal communities, the development of a collaborative planning agenda, and technical assistance in the implementation of tribal transportation.

Through Clough-Riquelme’s efforts, the intertribal council signed a historic agreement to join the SANDAG Board and Policy Advisory Committees as advisory members, marking the first tribal membership in the regional planning agency. Clough-Riquelme is currently planning the next Tribal Summit for 2010.AAP

Jane Clough-Riquelme. Photo: Provided.

Andrew Mocker with assistant Lotte Allen at Jungle Press in Brooklyn. Photo: Sarah Carpenter (B.F.A. ’10).

If an artist working at Jungle Press is new to printmaking, Mockler is able to assert himself as a printmaker, guiding the artist to the techniques best suited to his work and helping him or her “get used to the synthetic nature” of these processes. These artists, Mockler says, have “a fresh approach” to printmaking and are often the most willing to step outside traditional techniques.

If the artist, however, already has printmaking experience, Mockler’s most important task is to push the project forward. He must experiment with the techniques in his repertoire to meet the prints, and monoprints. In the 16 years since he artist’s demands without allowing the artist to get opened Brooklyn’s Jungle Press, Mockler has too stuck on a technical idea. In other words, he developed a strong reputation and a trademark style: deceptively simple-looking work that masks admits, he sometimes needs to be a little bossy.

Mockler’s work as a master printer is as much the complex accumulation of layers it takes about diplomacy as it is about technical expertise; to produce it. Mockler is a rare breed among printers; he does it all, from preparing litho stones he must always maintain the delicate balance between an artist’s conceptual plans and the to carving woodblocks to etching copper plates. processes’ practical capabilities.

The wide range of his technical expertise is a The collaborations in Mockler’s studio result of his keen interest in learning and adding to materialize in different ways. Sometimes he his skill set, which he’s gleaned from everywhere approaches artists, offering to be both printer and he’s been and every printer he’s encountered— publisher of an edition. At other times he acts as a starting with his time at Cornell. contract printer for an artist and another publisher, His enthusiasm for the collective knowledge which could be anyone from the artist’s gallery to and community inherent in printmaking began a nonprofit organization looking for a benefit print in Tjaden Hall’s intaglio and lithography shops, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Artists also where he was surrounded by the undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty who shared studio approach him to do an edition as a result of his reputation and his presence at the print fairs he space. There he learned by observation the attends throughout the East Coast, most recently, value of multiple-color proofing from Associate Professor Elisabeth Meyer and how to share the the Editions|Artists’ Book Fair in New York City.

In fact, he hopes to integrate several new responsibility of printing an edition with another artists into Jungle Press soon, even as he artist from Associate Professor Greg Page. prepares for two upcoming print fairs—the Above all, he says, “communal printshops are important because of the daily contact with a peer Baltimore Fair for Contemporary Prints & New Editions, and the AD 20/21: 11th Annual Boston group”—and, in his case at Cornell, an inspiring Print Fair—as well as an upcoming retrospective crowd of more advanced printers—they provide. of Joan Snyder’s work at Rutgers University’s Mockler founded Jungle Press in 1994 with Zimmerli Museum of Art. a few presses and litho stones he bought from Mockler’s career requires a final balancing his former employer, master printer Herb Fox. act: not only does he teach at Bard and Hunter He had experience printing with Michael Mazur colleges, but he also works as an artist in his in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and studying own studio practice. He paints, prints, and under the faculty and visiting artists (including printers from Crown Point Press and the Tamarind makes sculptures of “abstractions from nature,” Institute) at Yale University, from which he earned achieving a direct sense of light and color by using compositional and chromatic elements an M.F.A. in 1990. Each of these printers taught that refer to natural light sources. He is able to Mockler new experimental techniques and set aside several months of the year to close “shortcuts to traditional methods.” Mockler’s down the print shop and dedicate all of his time synthesis of all these alternatives into his own to his own work, which he has shown recently at practice has made him an important part of the Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn and at New York City printmaking world, a close-knit George Billis Gallery in New York City and Los community that is just big enough to be wildly Angeles. diverse and just small enough to be intimate and Mockler is committed to continuing the use in high demand. of traditional methods as part of his practice; the Mockler’s job is more than simply letting the artists with whom he collaborates use printmaking more technology permeates the art world, he says, the more people “crave the hand feel” of materials as a means to producing an edition. prints. And when he’s not painting in his studio, He sees each “collaboration as a dialogue” and teaching university printmaking classes, or every project with a new artist as a chance to showing Jungle Press’s work at international print “get into the other person’s shoes for a month.”

AAP The encounter between artist and printer “pushes fairs, Mockler is there to provide it.

—Sarah Carpenter (B.F.A. ’10) artists out of their normal, day-to-day studio habits” and benefits both parties.

David Evan Todd’s (B.F.A. ’06) photograph, The Experimental floating light bulb, has been included in the Method: Andrew Mockler and Jungle “Inklight” section of AfterImage magazine Press When artists such as Joan Snyder, Diana Cooper, and Mary Heilmann produce print online, published by the Visual Studies editions of their work, they often collaborate with Andrew Mockler (B.F.A. ’86) to produce Workshop. editions of lithography, intaglio, woodblock M.R.P. Alumna Honored as Global Innovator Ella Silverman (M.R.P. ’05), executive director of World of Good Development Organization, has been selected as one of the laureates in the annual Tech Awards (Technology Benefiting Humanity), which recognize organizations for applying technology to benefit humanity and spark global change.

Silverman and her colleague Audrey Seagraves are being honored for the development of the Fair Wage Guide software, a program that provides localized pricing evaluation of handmade goods to improve wages for female workers.

The Tech Awards program honors global innovators who are addressing critical issues facing the planet and its people in five universal categories: environment, economic development, education, equality, and health. One laureate in each category will receive a $50,000 cash prize at the annual awards gala in November 2010. World of Good’s entry was selected from among more than 600 nominees, representing 66 countries.AAP

In Memoriam Lawrence Halprin ’39 died on October 25, 2009,

at his home in Kentfield, California. Best known for designing the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial along the Tidal Basin in Washington, DC, and San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square, Halprin also designed the Charlottesville Mall in Virginia; Seattle’s Freeway Park; Minneapolis’s Nicollet Mall; Denver’s now-demolished Skyline Park; Fort Worth’s Heritage Park; Portland, Oregon’s Lovejoy Plaza; and the pedestrian approach to Yosemite Falls in Yosemite National Park. Among his awards were the 2002 National Medal of the Arts, the University of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture, a gold medal from the American Society of Landscape Architects, and a Presidential Design Award. Halprin was 93 years old.

Ed Rosen (B.Arch. ’56) died on April 14, 2010 at the age of 74 after a long battle with myelofibrosis and leukemia. Rosen was a senior vice president at Bovis Lend Lease, a firm he joined in 1984. He was an integral part of their operations in Ithaca for many years and worked on prominent projects on the Cornell campus. Earlier he worked for General Foods and Ulrich Franzen & Associates. An emeritus member of AIANY, Rosen recently worked on the restoration of the landmark U.S. Post Office in Brooklyn among other high-profile projects. Rosen was a longtime member of AAP’s Advisory Council and helped stock the Hans Bethe House library with books from his personal collection.

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Students from Associate Professor Milton Curry’s (B.Arch. ’88) Urban Metabolism: Mexico City design studio in a flea market in Tepito, Mexico City. The class traveled to Mexico for eight days. Photo: Jerry Lai (M.Arch. ’12).

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