AAP News 18

News18 New Home for AAP NYC

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

College of Architecture, Art, and Planning Cornell University 129 Sibley Dome Ithaca, NY 14853-6701 (607) 254-6292 aapcommunications@cornell.edu Rebecca Bowes, Elise Gold Daniel Aloi, Kenny Berkowitz, Rebecca Bowes, Aaron Goldweber, Anne R. Kenney, Kent Kleinman, Sherrie Negrea design Studio Kudos copy editor Laura Glenn photography William Staffeld (unless otherwise noted) distribution coordinator Sheri D’Elia editors

contributing writers

cover The main entrance to the new AAP NYC studio at 26 Broadway in lower Manhattan. photo / © Garret Rowland, courtesy Gensler

© October 2015 Cornell University Printed on Rolland Enviro 100 Satin, a Forestry Stewardship Council stock.

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

Universities are bipolar, but it is not a disorder. We are responsible for producing new knowledge, for exploring speculative propositions, and advancing groundbreaking ideas. Those doing sponsored research, especially those with federal grants, are doing the people’s bidding by probing the concerns of the res publica; those working on creative projects are incubating a nascent critical practice to inflect the main­ stream. Considerable effort is invested by faculty in exploring new ideas and sharing these ideas with students in the classroom, the studio, and in collaborative research settings. The university is the home proper to such pursuits.

However, in equal measure, we are responsible for conserving knowledge, for teach­ ing the classics (read: the plan of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, the urban theories of Kevin Lynch, the paintings of Joseph Albers, freehand drawing, first-year writing, and physical modeling), and preserving the great works of the past in our archives, in our curricula, and in our scholarship. Considerable effort is invested in this mission, and here, too, the university is the proper locus for this charge.

The centerfold of this issue presents a project that is the material embodiment of these forward- and backward-facing responsibilities. As a consequence of changed circulation patterns in the linked Sibley-Milstein-Rand complex, as well as structural, environmental, and security concerns, we have been planning for a new home for Cornell’s world-class fine arts print collection even before Milstein Hall opened in 2012.

Libraries in general have become lightning rods and litmus tests for the debate over old and new technologies of learning, and our library project is no exception. On campus, the Ho Fine Arts Library has precipitated a lively discussion on the optimal balance between analog and digital materials, on the future of the book, and on the correct proportion of investment in preserving old and introducing new modes of teaching and learning. The debate is hardly unique to Cornell, but our determination to retain an academic identity that honors the past without nostalgia and embraces the future without amnesia is rare and important. University Librarian Anne R. Kenney and I have included within a short and soft manifesto to delineate our position. I’m confident you will agree that the proposed design and the program it houses represent the twin values of preservation and speculation that you associate with this college and this university.

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

A rendering of the new Ho Fine Arts Library at night shows the illuminated lantern emerging from the roof of Rand Hall (schematic design). rendering / Isochrom, © 2015 Wolfgang Tschapeller ZT GmbH

Fall 2015 2 News&Events

2 New Space, New Programs, New Vitality at AAP NYC 4 New Faculty Hires; AAP Launches International Executive Education Program; Design Expo Gets RAW 5 Spring 2015 Lectures

8 Profiles

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8 A lumni: Shelly Silver (B.F.A./B.S. ’80) 9 Student: Annie Pease (M.R.P. ’16) 10 Faculty: Aleksandr Mergold, Architecture

11 Ho Fine Arts Library

15 Students

15 M.F.A. Berlin Trip; New Bean Family Gift 16 Triumphs for CRP Students; HAUD Fellowships and Grants; Jang Wins KPF Fellowship 17 2014–15 Student Academic Awards

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20 Faculty&Staff

20 Books by Kudva and O’Donnell 21 Gensler Family Gift Names AAP NYC Executive Director Position; Tenure Announcements; Beard Appointed to WRI; Donaghy Named RSAI Fellow

22 Alumni 21

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22 Eisenman Wins Topaz Award; Bicknell Develops Cornell Tech Building 23 G erakaris Tropicália Installation; AAP Alumni Win Rome Prizes; Perlman Exhibit 24 Milan Expo Features Architecture Alumni Pavilions

News18 | Fall 2015

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New Space, New Programs, New Vitality at AAP NYC 4

As of late March, AAP NYC has a new home at 26 Broadway, a historic landmark building overlooking lower Manhattan.

Occupying more than 11,000 square feet of former boardroom space on the entire 20th floor of what was the Standard Oil Building, AAP NYC hosts graduate and undergraduate students in architecture, planning, fine art, and landscape architecture, as well as professional education programs and public events.

The newly renovated site features gallery space, a multiuse room for lectures and public events, and expanded studio and classroom areas for students, who moved in on March 27.

The space, which was renovated by M. Arthur Gensler’s (B.Arch. ’57) firm, Gensler, was customized to meet the range of AAP’s pro­ gramming needs and is adaptable for various uses during and be­ tween semesters. Its natural lighting and 360-degree views enhance the experience of the city as an extension of the classroom. Gensler and family also recently announced a gift to fund the appointment of the executive director position in AAP NYC (see story on page 21).

The opening of the new headquarters was emblematic of the excite­ ment that carried through the entire semester and into the summer, a sampling of which is captured in the images on these two pages.AAP

1 The historic building at 26 Broadway in lower Manhattan. photo / Yuriy Chernets (M.Arch. ’15) 2 Master of architecture students in their studio space at AAP NYC. photo / Yuriy Chernets (M.Arch. ’15) 3 Christopher Morse (M.Arch. ’17) (standing, at right) presents his work during the final review of the core design studio, titled Edge Interface: Gansevoort Marine Transfer Station and Environmental Education Center, taught by Visiting Critic Marc Tsurumaki. Seated reviewers include (from left): Nat Oppenheimer, principal, Silman; Stella Betts, partner, LevenBetts; Lyn Rice, principal, Rice+Lipka Architects; and AAP Advisory Council member David J. Lewis (M.A. HAUD ’92), principal, LTL Architects. photo / Zachary Tyler Newton (M.Arch. ’10)

4 Alumni, friends, and students attend the opening celebration of the new AAP NYC studio at 26 Broadway on March 23. photo / Mike Moyer 5 Rebecca Allen (B.F.A. ’17), left, and Tiffany Li (B.F.A. ’17) on the New York City subway. photo / Anna Warfield (B.F.A. ’17) 6 Gensler signs copies of his book, Art’s Principles, at the opening celebration of the new AAP NYC studio space at 26 Broadway on March 23. photo / Anna Warfield (B.F.A. ’17) 7 B.F.A. students visit the studio of multimedia artist Robert Melee (center, brown sweater). photo / Anna Warfield (B.F.A. ’17)

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“Given

the urbanization of the world’s population, AAP’s expan­ sion in the city represents not just bigger and better space, but a fundamental shift in our curriculum toward one of the world’s most interesting and urgent challenges.”

Kent Kleinman, Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of AAP

News&Events

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“For

all of our students, New York City is a laboratory and a muse. Students immersed in this environment are forever changed.”

Robert Balder, (B.S. URS ’89), Gensler Family Sesquicentennial Executive Director of AAP NYC

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In early July, the M.Arch.II program was given a private tour of Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980, an exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Led by MoMA’s Jennifer Gray (left photo, center, in white jacket), the tour was held when the rest of the museum was closed to the public. That evening at the AAP NYC studio, Barry Bergdoll (at left), curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, delivered a presentation on his experience cocurating the exhibition.

Other panel participants that evening included Mary Kate O’Hare, the curator of the award-winning exhibition Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s–50s, held at the Newark Museum in 2010; and Zeuler R. M. de A. Lima, the author of the acclaimed biography Lina Bo Bardi (Yale University Press, 2013).AAP

News18 | Fall 2015

Dogan, Expert in Sustainable Design, Joins Architecture Faculty p hoto / provided

The Department of Architecture appointed Timur Dogan as an assistant professor, starting in July. Dogan investigates the intersections of architecture, sustainability, building performance simulation, and computational design.

Dogan’s research focuses on daylighting, energy modeling, passive climate control strategies, and performance-driven design workflows in both urban and architectural scales. He has published articles in the Journal of Building Performance Simulation, and is the lead developer for Archsim Energy Modeling; UMI, a Rhinobased urban modeling interface; and Urban Daylight simulation software for Rhino and Grasshopper. Dogan is teaching required and elective environmental systems courses at AAP. Prior to joining the faculty at Cornell, Dogan was a member of the Sustainable Design Lab at MIT and Harvard GSD, where his research was supported by a MIT Presidential Fellowship, a Transsolar Energietechnik GmbH fellowship, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Dogan holds a degree from the Master in Design Studies program at Harvard GSD; a Diplom-Ingenieur in architecture with distinction from the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, where he was a fellow of the German National Academic Foundation; and a Ph.D. from MIT. Dogan has worked for KSP Architekten, Wandel Hoefer Lorch Architekten, and the climate engineering firm Transsolar.AAP

Charles Joins CRP and Baker Program in Real Estate p hoto / provided

Suzanne Lanyi Charles joined the department of City and Regional Planning and the Baker Program in Real Estate as an assistant professor on July 1.

Charles’s current scholarly research examines physical, social, and economic changes in postwar suburban neighborhoods.

Her research has received grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and from the Real Estate Academic Initiative at Harvard University.

“Suzanne Charles brings an unusual combination of knowledge and experience to CRP and the Baker Program,” says Susan Christopherson, chair of CRP. “Her Ph.D. in planning has given her a broad view of urban development that can help students gain perspective on emerging trends, such as suburban transformation and inner-city densification. And as an architect with experience in the real estate industry, she can convey the value that good design brings to real estate development.”

Prior to coming to AAP, Charles was an assistant professor of architecture at Northeastern University in Boston, and an assistant professor of urban planning at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. She has worked as an architect at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Paris, and at Booth Hansen in Chicago; and also as a real estate consultant at the Weitzman Group in New York City. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture, and received her doctorate in urban planning from Harvard University.

Charles’s spouse, Patrick Charles, has been hired as a visiting associate professor of architecture, with teaching responsibilities in the Department of Architecture and the Baker Program in Real Estate.AAP

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1 RAW EXPO, held in March in the Milstein Hall dome, featured more than 50 studentdesigned projects from seven of Cornell’s colleges. photo / Chris Andras (B.Arch. ’18) 2 Richard Kennedy (center, in blue jacket) of James Corner Field Operations (JCFO) leads the AAP executive education program on a tour of the High Line.

JCFO was the project lead for the High Line. photo / Nancy Borowick

AAP Launches International Executive Education Program A contingent of 22 design professionals from China enrolled in AAP’s first executive education program this summer, taking a series of courses taught by worldrenowned architects in New York City and leading AAP faculty in Ithaca.

On June 21, AAP rolled out an intensive nine-day program of design seminars, site tours, and visits to major architectural firms in Manhattan. The participants met key players who have planned and designed landmark architectural projects in New York City, such as the World Trade Center, the High Line, and the Time Warner Center.

“This is an international educational institute that brings architects from around the world to an important academic setting to think about the future of the city,” said Kent Kleinman, the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of AAP. The idea to develop a design institute for executive education was proposed by M. Arthur Gensler (B.Arch. ’57), founder of Gensler, the global architecture, design, planning, and strategic consulting firm. At a meeting of the AAP Advisory Council, Gensler suggested that AAP provide “a place where East meets West in the design cultures,” Kleinman said.

A group of Advisory Council members rallied behind the idea and provided essential advice and support. “The power of our New York City–based network of design professionals is unparalleled. We could not have done this without them,” Kleinman said.

Zoe Zhou, a structural engineer at Tongji Architectural Design (Group) Co. Ltd., in Shanghai, helped coordinate the program and was among the first group of participants to enroll. During the discussions with AAP leaders last year, Zhou reviewed sample modules of courses the program would offer.

“Because there are many famous architects doing design and development in New York City, we wanted to learn about the whole process, from the engineering to the planning of individual buildings,” Zhou said during her visit to Ithaca.

The success of the program has already led to planning for a second round of executive education offerings next summer. AAP intends to offer two nine-day sessions next June and July.

“Our goal is to choreograph nine unforgettable days of engagement with the city and its creative protagonists, and to build an international network of leaders who can work together to shape the cities of tomorrow,” said Robert Balder (B.S. URS ’89), the Gensler Family Sesquicentennial Executive Director of AAP NYC. “In the years to come, AAP NYC will be the hub of this network.”AAP Sherrie Negrea

Design Expo Gets RAW The Milstein Hall dome was packed on March 20 for the inaugural RAW EXPO, where more than 50 student-designed projects from seven of Cornell’s colleges were on display. The theme of the show—raw—was conceived of to encourage the display of work in its “intermediary [and] process state.” The range of projects included planes, robots, furniture, fashion, sculpture, and architectural models.

Organized by the student group that publishes Association, RAW EXPO was held in collaboration with the lecture “Thumbnail: RAW,” which took place immediately after the expo.

Association is a student-run publication featuring projects by students, faculty, and alumni in the disciplines of architecture, art, and planning. Volume 7, released in August, follows the precedent established with the RAW EXPO, highlighting interdisciplinary connectivity and featuring projects with collaborations between AAP and non-AAP students.AAP association.aap.cornell.edu

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News&Events

Spring 2015 Lectures

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aap.cornell.edu/events LECTURES

Diana Agrest Fabrizio Barozzi Andrew Bielak, Daniel Kelleher, Katelyn Wright João Luís Carrilho da Graça Jennifer Coates Marco Cremaschi Alberto Dambruoso Martín Domínguez Esteban Dynasty Handbag Flavio Favelli Luca Galofaro and Beniamino Servino Pietro Garau Kris Goddard Jill H. Gotthelf and Walter Sedovic Michelle Grabner Leslie Hewitt Matthew Hoffman Ron Jude Christian Kerez Kengo Kuma LABICS: Claudia Clemente and Francesco Isidori Jonathan Marvel Edmund J. McMahon Jessica Millman Sabine Müller Shih-Fu Peng Cecilia Puga John Reps Jim Rokakis Noliwe Rooks Kevin Walker Claire Zimmerman

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1 João Luís Carrilho da Graça 2 Kengo Kuma 3 Noliwe Rooks 4 John Reps 5 Dynasty Handbag

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Leslie Hewitt, the spring 2015 Teiger Mentor in the Arts, delivered a public lecture titled “Still Life” in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium in February. Hewitt made three multiday trips to campus where she worked closely with students, focusing on the M.F.A. program, and specifically the thesis group. She is the fourth Teiger Mentor in the Arts, following Alejandro Cesarco, Shannon Ebner, and Josiah McElheny.AAP News18 | Fall 2015 5

Apocalyptic Hydra 2015’s Dragon Day protagonist was conceived of under the theme of the apocalypse. The beast was crafted out of 1,500 feet of steel, 72 yards of fabric, 64 cubic feet of insulation foam, suspension cables, and a little paint and glue.

For the first time, students employed digital technology in the form of the CNC routers in the Rand Hall Fabrication Shop to carve from foam the 2,358 individual geometric surfaces that comprise the head. The dragon made the annual parade across campus with much fanfare on March 27.

photo / Nancy Borowick

Between Worlds Shelly Silver’s (B.F.A./B.S. ’80) latest film, the 52-minute frog spider hand horse house, opens with a frog kite drifting across a blue sky, wandering past the edge of the frame and back again. The film cuts to a group of people practicing tai chi, accompanied by the achingly slow adagio of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata. We see more clouds, trees, sky; a man’s hands on a piano keyboard; a dead bat on a wooden floor; a young girl’s pinkpainted toenails; bees entering a rotted tree trunk; schoolchildren being told, “Simon says, ‘Be quiet.’”

“I wanted to make a film where language isn’t a driving force,” says Silver. “I wanted to make a film about children, animals, death, and pedagogy—all the elements of fairy tales—but I didn’t want to have a fairy, and I didn’t want to have a story-driven film. I wanted a film that’s magical and yet viscerally observational, where there’s an intuitive weaving of all these tropes that get picked up again and again in different ways, where I’m setting a tone of: ‘This is it. This is what you’re going to be seeing.’”

To watch a film by Silver is to lose yourself in a world of ideas, images, and questions about how we live. For in complete world (2008), she filmed on the streets of New York City, asking strangers, “Are you satisfied?” “Does equal opportunity exist in the United States?” “Are we responsible for the government we get?” In TOUCH (2013), she turned to fiction, shooting from the point of view of an unseen, unnamed, gay Chinese librarian-turned-photographer who’s taking care of his dying mother. In 37 Stories About Leaving Home (1996), she chronicled three generations of Japanese grandmothers, mothers, and daughters, telling their stories within the context of a folktale.

In one of 37 Stories’ sweetest, saddest moments, a woman talks about her career as a benshi, a performer who provides live narration to accompany silent films. If there were a benshi to narrate her own life, Silver says she imagines a voiceover that shifts restlessly from one identity to another, constructing a set of fictions that reveal little about herself. So we wouldn’t hear much about growing up in Brooklyn and on Long Island, or about being the daughter of scientists, or coming to Cornell in 1975, where she earned a B.S. in European history and a B.F.A. in mixed media, back when campus faculty debated whether photography should be considered art.

This voiceover would say little about her work since then—creating eight feature-length films and numerous shorts, with screenings and installations at the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Yokohama Museum of Art,

the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and hundreds of other places around the world. It might elliptically reference her accomplishments so far this year—major shows and retrospectives at Philadelphia’s Slought Foundation and Cinéma du Réel in Paris’s Centre Pompidou, an installation at Brussels’s Argos Centre for Arts and Media, gallery shows in Brooklyn, San Francisco, and SoHo—or might not mention them at all, eliding an Anonymous Was a Woman award (1998), a Jerome Foundation Fellowship (2000), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005).

“I would be a benshi who lies,” says Silver, who teaches at Columbia University and serves as chair of the visual arts program. But when Silver talks about her life, she’s as direct as the witnesses of in complete world. “I was a really obstinate kid growing up. I only wanted to do the things I liked to do. I was very passionate about reading, drawing, photography. I liked watching films and I liked watching television. When I came to Cornell, I was doing a lot of photography, but after my first year I got frustrated with its limits. I couldn’t fit my ideas into it. I shifted to a pared-down form of conceptual art, where I would write a word on a piece of paper, and since the art department was all about aesthetics, the discussion would turn on the texture of the pencil next to the paper, not about the expletive I had written. One of my professors finally said, ‘You should try film.’ And it made me grumpy, because I didn’t want to admit that he was right.”

But he was. That summer, after junior year, when Silver took a film class at the San Francisco Art Institute, everything clicked: All the studio classes she’d taken at Cornell. All the coursework she’d done in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, intellectual history. All the books she’d read by Deleuze, Derrida, Kristeva, Woolf, and the theorists of the Frankfurt School. All the conversations she’d had with Dominick LaCapra, her advisor in the College Scholar Program, an independent major program in the College of Arts and Sciences that Silver completed to earn a second degree. All the conceptual art pieces she’d made, all the fights she’d fought, all the frustrations she’d felt. Finally, she had a medium big enough to contain them.

“I was hooked,” says Silver. “With film you have language. Time. Sound. Images. You have expectations to push against. And once I understood this, my real work began. I came back to Cornell and wrote my own ticket, and that’s been the hallmark of my work ever since: pushing against assumptions about narrative, politics, visual form and duration, truth and its relationship to fantasy, storytelling, and misunderstanding. Film allowed me to dig more deeply into questions of persona, identity, historical inheritance, wish fulfillment, beauty and its discontents.”

Returning to campus, she borrowed equipment from the School of Hotel Administration and started piecing together experimental films that combined those different universes. She hosted a “weird pseudo– talk show” that aired on cable television at 2 a.m., fielding angry calls from angry callers. She took a filmmaking class with Marilyn Rivchin in the College

of Arts and Sciences, finished both degrees, and moved to New York City, ready to work.

She started in postproduction at Rough Cut, cutting alongside Tony Oursler and Michael Smith, before jumping to Rebo Studios, where she edited feature films, documentaries, music videos, advertisements, stand-up comedy, and industrial shorts. Then, as part of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, she gave up her day job, moved to Berlin for a year and a half, and shot Former East/Former West (1994), in which she asked what it meant to be German after the Reunification, with on-street interviews about words like history, socialism, capitalism, freedom, and foreigner.

Decades later, she’s surprised to find herself still working in the same medium, still in love with the moving image and everything it can do. “Let me count the ways,” she says. “When I started, I didn’t know what film could bring to me. That it would allow me to enter situations I couldn’t access without a camera, to ask questions and give people a platform to say what they might not say if someone with a camera had not asked. That it would allow me to see my neighborhood, my country, gender, myth, the view out the window, another person’s face in a way I could not otherwise.

That I could frame space, slow down time, juxtapose unlikely ideas, sounds, or stories, and bring people together in darkness to watch, a room full of strangers all facing this ephemeral, projected, flickering light.”

For frog spider hand horse house, Silver videoed schoolchildren in Halifax playing Simon Says; artists at Yaddo and MacDowell, including the ones playing piano in darkened rooms; a horseback-riding school; students at a summer school for composers; frogs, spiders, snakes, and the dead bat caught in the mesh of Silver’s screen door at Yaddo. She edited by intuition, knowing she wanted to start with an image of a frog floating in a blue sky, and working nonstop over the next 48 hours to finish the film’s first 40-minute rough cut.

“Working with a nontraditional structure, as I edit the first few minutes of a film, I’m always aware of laying the groundwork—a careful connection between sound, movement, gesture, and music, so that the audience, even if they don’t consciously understand, will feel held,” says Silver, who talks about frog spider’s “binary structure of children and animals, two endangered species,” before returning to her own coming-of-age story in Ithaca.

“I didn’t want to go to Cornell; my parents strongarmed me into going,” she says. “But it turned out to be the right place for me in so many different ways. I had a studio, I had a small community, but I was also part of the larger university, which I understood as a microcosm of the world I was about to enter. I learned that staying in the cracks between realms, disciplines, and industries is an interesting place to be. Am I in the art world? Am I in the film world? Do I make documentaries? Do I make fiction films? There are all these different ways I function, which aren’t exactly in any one world or another. At Cornell, I found this place between worlds, and that’s the place I’ve continued to be.”AAP Kenny Berkowitz

Profiles

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Skill Transfer When Annie Pease (M.R.P. ’16) learned that the Peace Corps was posting her to Azerbaijan, her initial reaction was, “Where’s that?” But even after finding it on a map—straddling Europe and Asia, and bordered by Armenia, Georgia, Iran, Russia, and Turkey—it was impossible to predict what it would feel like when she reached Masazir, a semi-urban settlement on the periphery of the capital city of Baku.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” says Pease, who spent September 2011 to June 2014 with the Peace Corps in Azerbaijan. “The physical landscape had an odd combination of the developed and the developing worlds.

There were cars, but many of the roads weren’t paved. There were houses, but they were just simple structures surrounded by tall gates.

There were chickens running around major roads just outside the city.

There were familiar things, like modern office buildings with beautiful glass windows, and people would tie up their horses outside.

“The culture is heavily influenced by Russia, Turkey, and Iran, three neighboring powerhouses,” she continues. “Azerbaijan is this little country that sits right between them, and to identify what is Azerbaijani is really difficult. There was this sense that I had a lot to learn, which was daunting and exhilarating at the same time. I had this great experience in front me, but no idea what it was going to be like.”

After growing up 6,000 miles away in the suburbs outside Atlanta, where her father worked as a transportation planner and her mother as a nurse practitioner, Azerbaijan was a great place to learn about the complexities of international development. The country, which became the world’s first Muslim-majority democracy in 1918, was incorporated into the Soviet Union two years later, and didn’t regain independence until 1991, when it plunged into a period of ethnic warfare, massacres, and attempted coups. By the turn of the century, Azerbaijan had stabilized under a new president, with a new series of purges to consolidate power in a democracy that has virtually no opposition parties, one of the world’s fastest-growing petroleum economies, and full diplomatic relations with the United States.

That’s where Pease landed in September 2011, ready to help. After applying to the Peace Corp with the expectation of utilizing her undergraduate minor in Spanish to work in either Central or South America, Pease was shocked when the assignment to Azerbaijan came through. But she reexamined her motives, and decided that her desire to be part of the Peace Corps—having what she calls “a greater connection to the Peace Corps around the world”—was more important than using her years of training in Spanish.

Now, four years later, she’s halfway through the Master of Regional Planning program, where she continues to apply her experiences from Azerbaijan every day. As campus representative for the Peace Corps, she’s talking to other students about her service abroad; as president of the Organization of Cornell Planners (OCP), she’s helping to voice student policy concerns within the department; as a grad student, she’s broadening her understanding of economics, planning, and public policy as she works toward a career in international development.

In all three of these realms, the key has been her work in Azerbaijan, where she focused on building community and empowering people to take a leading voice in determining their future. She started in Masazir, where she spent three months learning to speak Azerbaijani and working within the country’s educational system, which relies closely on a Soviet model of rote memorization, repetition, and corporal punishment. Living with a Muslim family, she started mornings with a 35-minute walk to school, followed by four hours of language classes, four hours of technical training in teaching English, a 35-minute walk home, and an evening spent trying to communicate with her hosts.

“It was a full immersion,” says Pease, who now speaks Azerbaijani fluently. “Those first three months were very structured, with training six days a week. We didn’t have much downtime, and in the little downtime we did have, we were with our host families. I had an Azerbaijani mother, father, brother, and sister. It was an intense experience to have culture shock, to be so far away from home, and to be in this living environment where it was very difficult to express even basic things. But really, it was the best way to learn and to experience what it’s like to be a Peace Corps volunteer. You have to be comfortable

being an outsider, and open and willing to learn from the people around you in a very vulnerable way.”

After training, Pease was sent to Tovuz, eight hours by bus from Baku, near the northwestern border with Armenia. For the next two years, she cotaught English to fifth-, sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders, working closely with Azerbaijani teachers to introduce Western concepts like lesson plans, interactive learning, student teaching, and conversation classes. At night, she worked one-on-one with the head English teacher, watching Al Jazeera on television to spark dialogue in English and Azerbaijani, or with her most promising pupil, who has since become a high school exchange student in Minnesota. By the end of Pease’s tour, her students were playing Frisbee and attending leadership camps, and their teachers were grading homework assignments and adapting textbook exercises into English dialogues, skits, and songs.

“Fundamentally, those may seem like really small things, but they have an impact on the English learning experience,” says Pease, who extended her time by another eight months, living on her own in Baku, training the next group of volunteers, and planning the next set of projects. “Even those small changes took so much time. You go somewhere with two suitcases, and you live in a community where no one knows who you are, and most people think you’re crazy for leaving America to live in this remote community. It takes the first year to really establish yourself. No matter what you’re doing, whether you’re in education, agriculture, or small business development, volunteers are there to work with people: to build confidence, leadership, and motivation, and to transfer skills. The whole idea is to work with people by learning from them and sharing your knowledge.”

In exchange for teaching others English, Pease not only learned Azerbaijani, but also learned about Islam firsthand, about the developing world, and about the best ways to provide the kind of help that communities can accept. Before she left Azerbaijan, she knew that she wanted to pursue graduate study in international development, and to continue making the on-theground impact she achieved during her 32 months abroad. She chose Cornell for its international focus, its long history of involvement with the Peace Corps— including CRP’s Nancy Brooks, Stephan Schmidt, and

Mildred Warner, three faculty members who are former volunteers—and its emphasis on a place-specific, culture-specific understanding of development, which empowers local communities to take a central role in the planning process.

Arriving in Ithaca last summer, Pease set to work learning the history of international planning, rounding out her background with classes in economics, geographic information systems (GIS), and public finance. For a course in qualitative research, she was part of a team in Cornell Dining’s Trillium food court, observing and analyzing behavioral shifts in recycling, composting, and waste. As president of the OCP—her term began in January and ends in December—she’s helped organize the department’s annual Town Hall event, where students’ concerns are discussed in a roundtable with faculty. This past summer, she worked for Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that tracks the impact of federal, state, and local subsidies for economic development, and for the fall and winter, Pease expects to focus her thesis on the nexus of economic development and participatory planning, incorporating lessons from both her internship at Good Jobs First and her service in Azerbaijan.

And after that? Sometime in the future, she’d like to consider a doctoral degree, but in the short-term, she’s thinking about following the master’s degree with another work experience, either at home or abroad, taking the advice she’s received from mentors at Cornell: that the best way to prepare for a career in development is to experience and understand the world outside the limited spaces that are familiar to you.

“There are so many opportunities in this department, so many resources, so many options,” says Pease, who is scheduled to finish her M.R.P. in June 2016. “Working effectively in international development is all about skill transfer, which is the difference between give-a-mana-fish versus teach-a-man-how-to-fish. Place matters.

Culture matters. It sounds good when you talk about it, but to actually do the work takes a lot of resources.

It’s hard. It’s slow. It takes a lot more than just sending people out to do a job. But what I’m learning is that if we bring more voices to the table, and if people believe that their participation will have an effect, we can open up the whole process. Ultimately, for change to happen, that’s how we need to approach it.”AAP Kenny Berkowitz News18 | Fall 2015

demonstrate “evidence of an architectural practice and design excellence”—so the loose collaboration became official, and Austin+Mergold emerged. The fledgling firm won the competition, and 10 of the 35 proposed units were built—and then the economy collapsed.

“And so there we were with the new practice and no work. We had to really get creative—invent projects, enter competitions, make objects, design maps, build things ourselves, do things that architects did not normally do.”

At the same time, Mergold decided to seriously pursue working in the classroom. He had initially ventured into academia while at Pentagram, teaching at both Parsons and the summer program at Cornell.

“It was first an homage to my grandfather and my mom, who both taught,” he says, “and also a vague notion that I would be interested in it given that I practically grew up in the design studio. But after I started, I realized that I also enjoy the process and it helps to change my perspective on the practice—the discoveries that we were making in practice could be explored further in the academic setting.” One evening he attended an office party for AAP Advisory Council member David J. Lewis (M.A. HAUD ’92). “[Associate Professor] Andrea Simitch was there,” Mergold says, “and she encouraged me to apply to be a visiting faculty member at Cornell.” Mergold returned to Cornell in 2008, and for the next six years taught in both AAP and the College of Human Ecology.

At the same time, he continued his practice work with Austin on private commissions, and entered and won competitions for several installation projects and public artworks. “[The economic lull] was a great time for us to test out new ideas and new materials,” Mergold says. “It really got us thinking about how our profession could be relevant again to society. We started thinking about a built environment that is economical yet flexible and unique. Buildings that people like and can use in a variety of ways tend to be around longest—and that’s the core of sustainability.”

Some of A+M’s projects from this time include A-House-in-a-Can, a 36-foot-diameter steel grain dryer that serves as the container for a 2,000-square-foot single-family starter home; and Gateway Bundle, the winning entry to a competition to transform a 700-gallon storm-water cistern at a brewery in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, into a public artwork. In 2010, A+M was recognized with the New York Architecture League Young Architects Prize.

As A+M received more attention, Mergold began to turn his focus to what he calls “the vast landscape of the built environment,” and how it has changed and blended in recent years into something much more complex than just urban, suburban, and rural. “Sural and rurban conditions are the extreme end of the same gradient range,” he says. In 2014, A+M won the Architectural League’s Folly competition with SuralArk, a reinterpretation of Noah’s Ark that combined the form of an overturned ship and a typical suburban house.

In addition to exploring the sural, Mergold is also fascinated with another term: spolia, which refers to using scavenged materials for new and often Mergold, who received his B.Arch. from Cornell in 2000 and his unintended purposes in constructed environments. interest in architecture. “I owe getting into Cornell to M.Arch. from Princeton in 2003, has been teaching at Cornell since Mergold explored this concept in depth during Randolph Goodman, a mentor in high school who was 2008, and was appointed an assistant professor in 2014. the 2014 Preston H. Thomas Symposium, “Spolia: a playwright. He worked with me on my writing right “Most people with architecture degrees . . . wouldn’t consider Histories, Spaces, and Processes of Adaptive Reuse.” after I arrived in New York City. He mentioned Cornell working in those places nor would they be using these materials,” says The symposium brought together students, panelists, to me, and it turned out that several alums from my Mergold. “And for good reason: vinyl siding, for example, is hated in the high school had also studied architecture at Cornell.” and faculty from multiple disciplines to explore spolia practice—it’s emblematic of everything that’s wrong with development. and its potential in contemporary design practice, Mergold’s undergraduate years at Cornell yielded But it’s also an ingenious system. And in a time of scarce natural art, history and preservation, material science, and some of the connections that have lasted throughout resources, we should try to work as much as we can with what we formation of culture. his career. In addition to meeting his future business already have a lot of. But, hopefully, in a new, much more exciting way.” partner, Austin, one of Mergold’s key takeaways from Mergold strongly values this type of collaboration The architecture, landscape, and design practice Mergold cofounded Cornell was the importance of attending lectures—and across disciplines. A+M is currently one of several with classmate Jason Austin (B.Arch. ’00), Austin+Mergold (A+M), has firms working on the redevelopment of the Morse/ not just the classroom type. “One night there was a met with recent success in the use of these ordinary materials for new guest lecture by James Biber (B.Arch. ’76) of Pentagram. Emerson Power Plant in Ithaca. Renamed the Chain purposes, and by doing so, the pair has made a bold statement about Works, the 95-acre site is being developed into a “live, I went, even though I had never heard these names what they want to bring to the practice of architecture. before. And that changed my life.” Mergold, impressed work, play” dense urban district. “It’s an interesting While the materials and setting for Mergold’s projects may not be by what he saw and heard during the lecture, exercise in being a small entity on a large team,” what he expected, his career as an architect was almost predetermined. approached Biber afterward. That conversation led Mergold says. “There are landscape architects, historic Born and raised in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Mergold is the third to Mergold joining Pentagram after graduation, and preservation architects, zoning specialists, civil generation in his family to practice architecture. As a child, Mergold’s working there for seven years, taking only one brief engineers, and, of course the local community . . . lots interest in architecture was piqued during summer programs with hiatus to earn his M.Arch. at Princeton. of players coming together on this big project.” And his mother, a professor at Tashkent Polytechnic University, who took Late in his tenure at Pentagram, Mergold re­connected the project is a model for what Mergold wants his groups of architecture students around the Soviet Union. What he saw with Austin, whom he had seen intermittently over students to understand and embrace. on those early trips fascinated him. the years. Austin’s father was a builder, and recruited “Students should learn to collaborate with not only “After only experiencing Tashkent, Bukhara, Samarkand, which Jason to help with the work. When he won a project the other professions who work on design projects, but are 2,000-year-old metropolises in Central Asia, suddenly seeing this to save some farmland in Pennsylvania from excessive also with the people who are ultimately using the end plethora of other possibilities of architecture . . . late Baroque and Art development, Austin’s father asked for input. “Jason, result,” he says. “It’s something that I don’t think is Nouveau in Lithuania, Italian classicism in St. Petersburg—and Moscow, Vladimir Pajkic (B.Arch. ’00), and I started helping with emphasized enough yet in our curriculum. I understand which combines many styles and building types—it was incredible. The the design and informal plans for the sites, so we got that we as instructors have to focus on giving students diversity of the buildings and styles was really overwhelming.” a loose collaboration going.” Shortly thereafter, Pajkic the famous Cornell skill set, but the ability to work in a When his family left Tashkent and moved to New York City in left for Basel—where he is now a partner at Herzog & de team, on a team, and to be able to form the team—that’s the early 90s, Mergold’s parents encouraged him to explore other Meuron—and Mergold and Austin heard about a grant a really critical skill for architects, and will be more and subjects. “I was interested in stage sets—scenography—for a while,” he competition to develop a mixed-income housing project more so in the coming years. And it’s something I strive says. But when it came time to look at colleges, Mergold restated his in Pennsylvania. But to enter the contest, they had to to bring to all of my studios.” AAP Rebecca Bowes

Musing on the Ordinary

“I never expected to work or find inspiration in this setting.” Architecture’s Assistant Professor Aleksandr Mergold is referring to both the location of many of his recent projects—rural central Pennsylvania and Upstate New York—and the building materials he works with: grain bins and steel cow barns with vinyl siding, suspended ceiling grids, and fiberglass siding.

A New Landmark Library for Cornell University

AAP is designing a new home for the Fine Arts Library (FAL).

The project addresses a host of issues critical to the university, the library system, and faculty and students across campus.

A Body of Books

HO FINE ARTS LIBRARY

Made possible by a generous gift from AAP alumna Mui Ho ’62 (B.Arch. ’66), the Ho Fine Arts Library will be housed in the upper floors of Rand Hall, while the first floor will remain dedicated to the AAP fabrication shops. The project includes rehabilitating the dilapidated envelope of Rand Hall, dramatically improving the building’s thermal and environmental performance, implementing a number of code upgrades, and reconfiguring the storied former studio spaces of Rand Hall to become a new state-of-the-art research library.

What constitutes a state-of-the-art research library for the fine and design arts? The basics include: public computers, shared and private spaces for collaborative and individual study, comfortable furniture, good light, seminar rooms outfitted with large displays for GIS and other data-visualization instruction, infrastructure for remote learning, workstations compatible with computers, phones, and tablets. And extraordinary librarians, trained in the most current digital technologies to help our students manage digital images and navigate online resources. The Ho FAL will provide all of this.

But the most state-of-the-art component of our new facility is not the newest technology and the latest equipment, which is only newest and latest for the briefest moment. It is the collection. Books. We will provide space for more than 150,000 on-site volumes. The protagonist of the new facility will be an open stack, circulating collection of books covering urban design and planning, architecture, fine arts, art history, landscape architecture, and interior design. Stable, immune from software glitches, with reliable color rendition and faithful text/image relationships, unchanging aspect ratios, and always fully charged. They never crash, even if 1,000 students each have 20 open at the same time.

The heart of the new library will be the renowned collection begun by President A. D. White in 1876, when he gifted to the Cornell Trustees his “prized obsession” in exchange for the establishment of a department dedicated to his favored subject, architecture. Wolfgang Tschapeller

(M.Arch. ’87), project architect, commented, “The design for the Ho Fine Arts Library is an immediate and quite physical invitation to discover an extraordinary collection which appears as one big volume, visible in its entirety upon entering.

Winding staircases are the keys to enter this volume of knowledge, browse, read, and wonder.”

Neither technophobia nor nostalgia motivates our focus on books. A recent faculty survey shows that junior faculty—those well versed in information technology—use the print collection more intensively than their senior colleagues.

A snapshot at the time of writing reveals that 100% of AAP assistant professors have books checked out from the FAL, compared to 57% for associate professors and 59% for full professors.

The FAL is the university’s most intensely used special collection by students and faculty: on average, 25% of the fine arts books are checked out every year. In the most recent senior survey, 88% of AAP students credited the library as contributing to their academic success. As Sophie Hochhäusl (M.A. HAUD ’10, Ph.D. ’15) notes, “My appreciation of the fine arts library spans two building facility carts and weighs approximately 200 pounds each semester.”

There are many reasons for the reliance on physical books in fine arts, architecture, and planning scholarship. Most obvious is the fact that a good portion of our printed materials is not online, and probably never will be. Esra Ackan, associate professor in architecture, noted that while some images are reproduced over and over again online, other less well-known photographs, plans, and drawings remain in printed books only. “We might be erasing a history by going digital,” she expressed. Fine arts books are characterized by images, and images—protected by use and copyright laws—are expensive to acquire and require specialized skill to reproduce. Publishing a fine arts or architecture book is famously difficult for faculty scholars because of the complex and costly image acquisition process. Translated to digital space, this results in many fine art volumes having their

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images redacted or watermarked. Such volumes paper type and font used.” Sequence matters (e.g., are useless for researchers. When images are the unrelenting mechanical pace of Erich Menincluded in digitized materials, the veracity delsohn’s 82 photographs of urban America in his of the reproduction is often marred by poorly 1936 “Amerika”). Format matters (e.g., the square managed input and output variables affecting format of Sol LeWitt’s autobiography foretelling key attributes of an image’s content: value, the nine-square image grid of every page within). chroma, aspect ratio, line quality, contrast, scale, Size matters (e.g., Pamphlet Architecture is indeed sequence, texture. Images are primary content, pamphlet sized). the language of our disciplines.

And matter matters. Books, especially fine arts In the fine arts and design fields, books are books, are constructed artifacts that in their very like buildings. You enter a book as you would objecthood are anchors of durable form in a life of enter an interior space. Your mental movements change (the German word for object is Gegenstand, are choreographed by the geography of the page. which neatly captures the role of objects to “stand Pages are thresholds. White space is a luxury, a against” time). The durability of books, when conspicuous nonconsumption. A full-page, fullproperly housed and maintained, allows them to bleed image is a special invitation to dwell, to function as yardsticks against which to measure slow your tempo and deepen your depth of field. change. In the arts, this durability is not separate Context matters. Athanasiou Geolas, a first-year from the physical artifact but is identical to it.

Ph.D. student in the history of architecture and a Considered together, our collection forms a unique former architect, shared that “physical books pro- physical body of knowledge dramatically celevide images and text in tandem and their meanbrated in our new Ho Fine Arts Library.AAP Anne R. ing in part is conveyed by how they are presented, Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, and Kent how the book is constructed, its size, and the Kleinman, Gale and Ira Drukier Dean, AAP

3 Rand Hall, as photographed circa 1911. photo / H. C. Cable

2 The scheme features four dense stack levels that will provide shelving for approximately 150,000 volumes, a generous double-height reading room, spaces for group and individual study on the main library level, and seminar rooms and offices on the upper levels (schematic design). rendering / Isochrom, © 2015 Wolfgang Tschapeller ZT GmbH

1 Previous page: A rendering of a view from the southeast shows the Ho Fine Arts Library and Rand Hall (schematic design). rendering / Isochrom, © 2015 Wolfgang Tschapeller ZT GmbH

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6 Following page: An isolated structural view of stacks with open staircases suspended from roof beams (schematic design). illustration / © 2015 Wolfgang Tschapeller ZT GmbH

5 The plan of the main floor shows the public reading hall, individual study carrels, one of four levels of book stacks, and access from both Rand Hall and the L. P. Kwee Studios in Milstein Hall (schematic design). illustration / © 2015 Wolfgang Tschapeller ZT GmbH

4 A cross-section shows the working spaces to the north, the reading area to the south, and the four levels of hanging stacks extending beyond the existing roof of Rand Hall into the lantern (schematic design). illustration / © 2015 Wolfgang Tschapeller ZT GmbH

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“Neither technophobia nor nostalgia motivates our focus on books.�

Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, and Kent Kleinman, Gale and Ira Drukier Dean, AAP

Collaborative student work from Visiting Assistant Professor Lorena Del Río’s A Journey into Plastics seminar was selected as an example of best studio projects worldwide in ArchDaily’s June 8 issue. Del Río’s class created Jello Pavilion as a design-build project to “bring a wave of fun to campus during the stressful final weeks of the semester.” The pavilion was comprised of more than 100 plastic panels of various geometries secured together through a calibrated technique of heating. When fully inflated, students could enter and spend time in the pavilion, which was filled with balloons, inflatable furniture, and light projections throughout the day.

Sophie Hochhäusl (M.A. HAUD ’10, Ph.D. HAUD ’15) has taken a tenure-track job in modern architectural history at Boston University’s art history department. In addition, from April 20 through May 10, German House at New York University presented an exhibition of photographic documents curated by Hochhäusl, titled Urban Agriculture and Modern Housing in Austria: Health, Food, and Labor in the Cooperative Settlement, 1903–1933. The exhibit illuminated Viennese citizens’ attempts to remedy sickness, malnourishment, and unemployment, as precursors to urban gardening movements and housing associations. Based on her dissertation, it was accompanied by a May 5 panel discussion. Also in May, Hochhäusl presented “From Siedlung to Suburb: Exhibiting the Austrian Prefabricated Home—Technological Transfer, Americanization, and the U.S. Economic Mission to Austria,” a chapter of her dissertation, at Columbia University’s Buell Dissertation Colloquium at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

Michael Raspuzzi (B.Arch. ’16) won a Class Council’s Outstanding Contribution Recognition Award for the Class of 2016, which recognizes Cornell students from each class for their “remarkable academic accomplishments and service contributions to the Cornell community.” Raspuzzi was the president of Life Changing Labs for 2014–15, and spent the year establishing the first summer startup incubator for student founders. He also helped establish the Fall Annual Kickoff Event, which grew the team to more than 25 students and four mentors. In addition, Raspuzzi cofounded a threeweek summer program for high school students to get experience in programming for web development, entrepreneurship, and design thinking. Raspuzzi also collaborated on three exhibitions: design work featured in the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Conference in Toronto in March, with Visiting Critic Andrew Lucia; and two exhibitions he assisted human ecology’s Associate Professor Jack Elliot with—Carya, which was on display in the Jill Stuart Gallery in the Human Ecology Building in June; and Five Uneasy Pieces, which appeared in the Nevin Welcome Center at the Cornell Plantations in March and April. Also, two of Raspuzzi’s photographs appeared in State of the Art Gallery’s Annual Photography Show, where one was a finalist.

1 Annie Raccuglia (M.F.A. ’16) examines a sculpture during a studio visit with Thomas Rentmeister. photo / Connie Wong (M.F.A. ’15)

A group of CRP students, faculty, and alumni gathered in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in April for the annual Historic Preservation Planning (HPP) work weekend. Each year, HPP selects a historic site in need of repair and gathers a team together for two days of handson restoration efforts. This year’s site was the First Baptist Church, where the group scraped and repainted interior and exterior walls, repaired or replaced windows, and fixed cracked plaster in the entry­ way. The students were joined by local preservationists from the Waterfront Historical Area League.

“The goal was for us to experience art and life in a global context,” says Connie Wong (M.F.A. ’15). Wong and the other M.F.A. students spent a week in Berlin over Spring Break, on a trip that included studios visits and museum and gallery tours.

The students, who were accompanied by associate professor and department chair Michael Ashkin, toured Berlin each day in groups and individually, as they pursued their interests and discovered what the city could offer.

They reconvened each night over dinner to discuss what they had seen, and how this connected to their own practices.

“The layered history of the city was especially interesting,” says Jenn Houle (M.F.A. ’15). “We were fortunate to have a private tour of the Boros Collection, housed in what was first a World War II bunker, then a storehouse for fruits and vegetables (nicknamed the banana bunker), then a night club, after which it was bought by the Boros family and remodeled for five years to house their private art collection.”

The students visited the studios of Thomas Rentmeister, Tom Knechtel, Tomás Saraceno, Tom Duncan, Benjamin Rubloff (M.F.A. ’11), and Olafur Eliasson, among others; the Museum für Fotografie, C/O Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof,

Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, and Martin-Gropius-Bau; as well as various other galleries, markets, parks, and historic sites throughout Berlin.

“It was an excellent experience, especially getting the chance to get out of the studio and into a larger global context,” says Houle. “It helped a lot to position ourselves and our work within an international art community . . . if only for a week! It was a chance to get out of the tunnel vision that can occur when focusing so closely on one’s own studio practice.”

“We had a chance to tightly organize this trip beforehand, while still leaving enough time for visits and events we learned of while already there,” says Ashkin. “We had a wealth of input, recommendations, and contacts provided to us before we even left.

It is wonderful to travel with motivated and mature students who thoroughly research a space and make the most of an opportunity. Overall it was a transformative visit—undoubtedly a high point in their program. We are extremely grateful to the gifts that made this trip possible.”

The trip was funded by a generous gift from Philip Rickey (B.F.A. ’84) and John Cooper (B.F.A. ’97).AAP

Additional Gift from Bean Family Expands Undergraduate Art Travel Abroad The family of David Richard Bean ’71 has given an additional $500,000 to provide travel funding for B.F.A. students studying abroad. Mr. and Mrs. Albert Bean ’43 established the prize in 1971 in memory of their son, David, who graduated from Cornell with a degree in government administration. While a student, he spent time in Europe and was enchanted with Florence, and had planned to study art.

The original gift provided financial support for travel to Rome to between three and five students each year. The new gift will significantly expand the number of prize recipients.

“We are incredibly grateful to the Bean family for their generosity,” says art chair Michael Ashkin.

“The opportunity to study abroad truly enriches the B.F.A. curriculum, and we are very fortunate for this support as we encourage more students to experience art internationally.”

The prizes are awarded through a juried exhibition.

This year’s recipients are Rebecca Allen (B.F.A. ’17), Laureen Andalib (B.F.A. ’17), Serena Cheng (B.F.A. ’17), Julia Cole (B.F.A. ’17), Veronica Constable (B.F.A. ’17), Tiffany Li (B.F.A. ’17), James Quinn (B.F.A. ’17), Rachel Redhead (B.F.A. ’17), Pauline Shongov (B.F.A. ’17), and Anna Warfield (B.F.A. ’17).AAP

photo / provided

An untitled landscape drawing by Belle Tenaglia (B.F.A. ’15) won a $5,000 scholarship from Hyatt Hotels and Canvas Wines in their annual Canvas Artist Series contest. Open to art students in the U.S., entrants submitted their artistic interpretation of one of the varieties of wine produced by Canvas Wines. Tenaglia’s entry, in the pinot grigio category, was required to incorporate the follow­ ing characteristics: “Bright pale straw yellow, fruity, and flowery fragrances reminiscent of the countryside in summer.” The sub­ mission pieces underwent a review process that included public voting. In addition to the scholarship, each winner’s artwork was featured as a label on a bottle of Canvas Wines.

M.F.A. Students Immerse Themselves in the Berlin Art Scene

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Dan Schulman (M.R.P. ’15) and his team won first place at the annual Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture, and Development (CIIFAD) poster-paper presentations and symposium for the Student Multidisciplinary Applied Research Teams (SMART) program projects. The program pairs students and faculty from diverse disciplines with organizations in developing countries, where they can contribute their expertise toward solving well-defined problems. The winning presentation, delivered on April 15, was on their economic development project in South Africa, which focused on enhancing human and social capital of farmers in Kwazulu Natal province. Other members of the team were Rachel Breslauer, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; Rebecca Chew, College of Engineering; and Nathaniel (Alex) Cordova, Cornell Institute for Public Affairs.

A short experimental film by Pauline Shongov (B.F.A. ’17), titled Moloko, was part of the Official Selection in the annual studentrun Ivy Film Festival, which took place from April 6–12, at Brown University. Shongov’s film explored the organic and the inorganic, the animate inanimate, and life and death.

Students

Student News

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During a spring field trip of southern Italy, Visiting Critic Jan Gadeyne, center, guides Cornell in Rome students on a tour of Herculaneum, a town destroyed during the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The group also visited sites in Naples, the Charterhouse of Padula, Matera, and Bari on the five-day tour.AAP

News18 | Fall 2015

Triumphs for CRP Students: Grants, Awards, and Contest Wins Better Philadelphia Challenge Five M.R.P. and M.L.A. students collaborated on the winning entry of the 2015 Better Philadelphia Challenge, an annual urban design competition founded in memory of Edmund Bacon (B.Arch. ’32), Philadelphia’s former city planning director. The international competition asks universitylevel students to design innovative solutions that address Philadelphia’s underdeveloped sites and infrastructure issues and are broadly applicable to industrialized cities worldwide.

Team members Akshali Gandhi (M.R.P. ’15), Robert Hanifin (M.R.P. ’15), Li-Yu Pan ’15, Chen Sun ’15, and Lishutong Zhang ’15 developed their submission, titled Delaware Valley FOODWORX, during the fall semester at AAP NYC. Delaware Valley FOODWORX centered on food security and flood resiliency in the greater Philadelphia region. The team won $5,000.

Design Connect Garners Awards

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1 The master plan for Delaware Valley FOODWORX, the winning entry to the 2015 Better Philadelphia Challenge.

2 Jang’s portfolio submission included this axonometric drawing from Under City (2014), a project aiming to introduce new typologies and experiences to the underground territories of Seoul, Korea.

In March, Design Connect received a 2015 Outstanding Planning Student Organization Award from the American Planning Association in recognition of the body of work the multidisciplinary group has produced in the last year.

Design Connect is a student-run, community design organization that offers practical experience to students through partnering with local municipalities and nonprofit organizations that may not have the resources to hire professionals. Since 2009, Design Connect has worked in more than 22 communities in Upstate New York, and involved hundreds of students from 16 different academic fields.

Design Connect received a prize of $1,125 at the 2015 National Planning Conference in Seattle in April.

In addition, Design Connect won the Portman Family Award, an annual CRP commencement award that “emphasizes the significance of the physical aspects of planning.” Typically awarded to a graduate student or graduate student team, the CRP faculty felt Design Connect had made an important difference in several Upstate New York communities over the course of the last academic year.

Student Planners Win Gaming Contest Announced in February, Kushan Dave (M.R.P. ’15) and Nicolas Grefenstette (M.R.P./M.L.A. ’16) won the Tygron Student Contest, a competition that challenged student planners to build their own “Serious Game,” or spatial tasking prototype, using Tygron 3D technology in the Tygron Engine.

Tygron created their Serious Games to allow stakeholders to experiment, plan, and negotiate better solutions for city designs and development projects.

Titled L.E.S. Is More, Dave and Grefenstette’s project explored the impact of the transfer of development rights in the Lower East Side in Manhattan. L.E.S. Is More focused on policy approaches that would allow the New York City Housing Authority to raise revenues in order to repair buildings and address residents’ needs.

The submission was based on work developed in the AAP NYC fall 2014 Urban Design Studio, taught by visiting faculty Adam Lubinsky, Claire Weisz, and Jacob Dugopolski of WXY Architecture and Urban Design. Dave and Grefenstette were awarded a €1,000 prize.

AAUW Grant Goes to M.R.P. Student Jaclyn Hochreiter (M.R.P. ’16) is the recipient of a 2015 Career Development Grant from the American Association of University Women (AAUW).

Hochreiter’s studies are focused on food systems planning with an interest in the economic drivers that yield waste within city and food systems. With the $12,000 award, Hochreiter says she “intends to explore the possibility of resource and energy cycling to create a more just and efficient system that is sensitive to environmental, communal, and cultural needs.”

According to their website, AAUW advances equality for women and girls through advocacy, education, philanthropy, and research. AAUW is one of the nation’s largest sources of private funding exclusively for educational programs that directly benefit women and girls, and awards fellowships and grants to more than 200 women each year.

Warner Class Wins APA Prize Twenty-four students in Professor Mildred Warner’s spring semester Upstate Fiscal Stress workshop and her Devolution, Privatization, and the New Public Management seminar worked together with a coalition of local government, school, and union groups to explore the nature of state austerity policy and opportunities for creative local response. The resulting projects were awarded the 2015 Outstanding Student Project Award by the New York Upstate Chapter of the American Planning Association (APA). The students presented their work at the Northeast Region APA conference in June 2015. A full list of student names can be seen at aap.cornell.edu/news-events/ warner-class-wins-apa-prize.AAP

HAUD Fellowships and Grants This spring, three Ph.D. candidates in the History of Architecture and Urban Development program (HAUD) were awarded grants and fellowships.

Elvan Cobb received a 10,000-lira fellowship from SALT, an Istanbul-based organization focused on visual and material culture. Cobb’s project was one of eight selected from more than 150 applicants. She will use the fellowship for work associated with her dissertation.

Titled Life Around the Rails, Cobb’s project explores the impact of railways on the daily spatial practices of Ottomans in western Anatolia during the 19th century, through an examination of mass media. Cobb will present the results of her research at a conference at SALT in December.

The 2015 Manon Michels Einaudi grant from Cornell’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and the Cornell Institute for European Studies was awarded to Anna Mascorella. One $3,500 grant is given each year for graduate research in the fields of European art and architecture, art history, literature, philosophy, or culture. Mascorella will use the funding to travel to Rome to begin research for her dissertation, which reconsiders the National Fascist Party’s urban interventions in the city by examining the regime’s negotiation of Rome’s Baroque architecture, urbanism, and rhetoric. She will visit archives and sites throughout the city.

Cornell’s John S. Knight Institute’s Buttrick-Crippen Fellowship provides a full year of support for a single fellow from the Graduate School to study and practice teaching undergraduate writing. Whitten Overby is the 2015–16 winner. He will spend the fall semester preparing a new First-Year Writing Seminar, and will teach that seminar in the spring semester. Overby will receive a stipend of more than $20,000, tuition, and health insurance.AAP

Jang Wins KPF Travel Fellowship Hyemin (Amy) Jang (B.Arch. ’16) is a winner of the prestigious 2015 Kohn Pederson Fox (KPF) Traveling Fellowship. Jang used the fellowship during the summer to visit several sites in Japan, including Tokyo, Naoshima, Yokohama, and Osaka, among others.

On her trip, Jang investigated “two extreme conditions of radical architectural speculation in Japan: the manic urbanism of the 60s and 70s, and the more recent phenomena that are subtle and idyllic constructions of architecture in nature . . . which seek to provide utopian lands of contemporary art and architecture.”

“By investigating the spatial products of these two extreme environmental conditions, I was trying to understand the underlying dreams, desires, and motives that led to the design of the various architectures,” says Jang. “I documented this journey through primary research and site visits, as well as analytic drawings.”

Winners of the competition are selected by portfolio review.

Jang’s winning submission contained a diverse selection of projects: a mixed-use development in Boston, an underground public space in Seoul, an urban crossing in Rome, and a museum in Binghamton, New York. The combination of projects met with the juror’s focus on portfolios that demonstrated attention to both “the overall big idea of the project and to the small, fine details,” according to KPF’s announcement.

“Jang’s portfolio was remarkable in its clarity and quality of drawings, and unique graphically,” says Mark Cruvellier, chair of the architecture department and the Nathaniel and Margaret Owings Professor of Architecture. “The selection of projects that it contained clearly and effectively supported her written proposal to visit architecture projects and urban centers in Japan for the KPF Traveling Fellowship.”

Each year, KPF awards three travel grants to students who are in their penultimate year at one of 26 design schools.

The goal of the award is to allow students to broaden their

2

education through a summer of travel before their final year at school. Each winner receives $8,000 for their trip, and another $2,000 after submitting a report about their travels.

This year’s KPF Fellowship jury included Chair Mónica Ponce de León, dean and professor of architecture at University of Michigan and principal, MPdL Studio; Michael Meredith, assistant professor of architecture at Princeton University and principal, MOS Architects; and Marianne Kwok and James von Klemperer, principals at KPF.AAP

Abadan Graduate Award Brian Havener (M.Arch. ’19) Addison G. Crowley (B.L.Arch. ’38) Prize Jorge Champin ’15 Takuma Johnson (B.Arch. ’17) Rina Kang (B.Arch. ’17) A. Henry Detweiler Scholarship Fund Sophie Hochhäusl (M.A. HAUD ’10, Ph.D. HAUD ’15) Anna Mascorella (M.S. ’16, Ph.D. HAUD ’19) Whitten Overby (M.A. HAUD ’13, Ph.D. HAUD ’19) Alpha Rho Chi Yuriy Chernets (M.Arch. ’15) Andrew Fu (B.Arch. ’15) American Institute of Architects Certificate of Merit Dillon Pranger (M.Arch. ’15) Cora Visnick (B.Arch. ’15)

Baird Prize First prize: Yoonseo Cha (B.Arch. ’18) Second prize: Justin Foo (B.Arch. ’18) Sampoong Sangga Michelle Heckman (B.Arch. ’18) Belcher-Baird Architectural Design Award Heather Mauldin (M.Arch. ’19) Bradford and Phyllis Friedman Perkins Graduate Award Jamie Mitchell (M.Arch. ’19) Charles Goodwin Sands Memorial Award Bronze medal: Aaron Goldstein (B.Arch. ’15) Isidoro Michan Guindi (B.Arch. ’15) Joseph Kennedy (B.Arch. ’15) Silver medal: Andres Gutierrez (B.Arch. ’15, M.S. ’18) Clifton Beckwith Brown Memorial Medal Aaron Goldstein (B.Arch. ’15) Douglas W. Hocking and Melinda H. Abrams Award Alireza Shojakhani (M.Arch. ’19) Earl R. Flansburgh Merit Award Justin Hazelwood (M.Arch. ’18) Wachira Leangtanom (M.Arch. ’18) Kai-Chun Wang (M.Arch. ’18)

RGB Endowed Graduate Award Mark Yu-Chen Lien (M.Arch. ’19)

City and Regional Planning

Art

Denmark Pavilion, a model by Daniel Toretsky (B.Arch. ’16) and Allison Wills (B.Arch. ’16), was featured in HOT TO COLD: an odyssey of architectural adaptation, a high-profile exhibition produced by Bjarke Ingles Group (BIG) at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, from January to August. The exhibition took visitors from the hottest to the coldest parts of the planet, and explored how BIG’s design solutions are shaped by their cultural and climatic contexts. Denmark Pavilion was initially created for the class titled Structural Systems taught by Department Chair and Nathaniel and Margaret Owings Professor of Architecture Mark Cruvellier.AAP

photo / Mason Limke

American Institute of Architects Henry Adams Medal and Certificate of Merit Kalim Chung (M.Arch. ’15) Aaron Goldstein (B.Arch. ’15)

Serena Cheng (B.F.A. ’17) Julia Cole (B.F.A. ’17) Veronica Constable (B.F.A. ’17) Tiffany Li (B.F.A. ’17) Robert D. MacDougall James Quinn (B.F.A. ’17) Memorial Scholarship Rachel Redhead (B.F.A. ’17) Fall 2014: Pauline Shongov (B.F.A. ’17) Anna Mascorella (M.S. ’16, Anna Warfield (B.F.A. ’17) Ph.D. HAUD ’19) Department of Art Spring 2015: Distinguished Elvan Cobb Achievement Award (Ph.D. HAUD ’17) Christine Pan (B.F.A. ’15) Athanasiou Geolas (M.A. HAUD ’16, Elsie Dinsmore Popkin Ph.D. HAUD ’21) ’58 Art Award Elliot M. Glass Sophie Hochhäusl Calvin Kim (B.F.A. ’15) Graduate Award (M.A. HAUD ’10, Faculty Medal of Art Stephen Clond (M.Arch. ’19) Ph.D. HAUD ’15) Danni Shen (B.F.A. ’15) Caroline Niederpruem Gökhan Kodalak (M.Arch. ’17) (M.A. HAUD ’15, John Hartell Graduate Ph.D. HAUD ’18) Award for Art Eschweiler Prize for Merit Anna Mascorella (M.S. ’16, and Architecture and Distinction in M.Arch.

Ph.D. HAUD ’19) Artemisha Goldfeder Design Studio Whitten Overby (M.F.A. ’15) Kalim Chung (M.Arch. ’15) (M.A. HAUD ’13, Jenn Houle (M.F.A. ’15) Charles Cupples Ph.D. HAUD ’19) (M.Arch. ’15) John “Kip” Brady Annie Schentag Iroha Ito (M.Arch. ’15) Memorial Award (M.A. HAUD ’12, Martin Raub (M.Arch. ’14) Kevin Cruz (B.F.A. ’18) Ph.D. HAUD ’17) Simin Wang (M.Arch. ’14) Merrill Presidential Robert James Eidlitz Helen Fagan Tyler Scholar Travel Fellowship Graduate Fellowship Danni Shen (B.F.A. ’15) Thalia Chrousos in Architecture (B.Arch. ’11) Ka Yin Fung (M.Arch. ’18) Juliette Dubroca Wachira Leangtanom (M.Arch. ’11) (M.Arch. ’18) Andrew Hart (M.Arch.II ’13) Xiaoyun Wang (M.Arch. ’18) Sarah Haubner American Institute Yifei Zhang (M.Arch. ’18) (M.Arch.II ’11) of Certified John Hartell Jacqueline Liu (B.Arch. ’13) Planners Outstanding Graduate Award for Art Nicolas Martin (B.Arch. ’12) Student Award and Architecture Zachary Newton John McManus (M.R.P. ’15) Rohan Cherayil (M.Arch. ’11) Department of City (M.Arch.II ’16) Konrad Scheffer and Regional Planning (M.Arch.II ’11) Kittleman Graduate Graduate Community Award in Architecture,Jinyang Sangga Ruth Bentley and Service Award Art, and Planning Richmond Harold Daniel McKenna-Foster Rohan Cherayil Shreve Award (M.R.P. ’15) (M.Arch.II ’16) Kalim Chung (M.Arch. ’15) Isaac Robb (M.R.P. ’15) Dillon Pranger (M.Arch. ’15) M.Arch.II Award for John W. Reps Award Simin Wang (M.Arch. ’14) Outstanding Performance Maria Brito (M.A. HPP ’15) in Architecture Sheinfeld Lindenfeld Peter B. Andrews Snigdha Agarwal International Graduate Memorial Thesis Prize (M.Arch.II ’15) Fellowship in Architecture Helen Schnoes (M.R.P. ’14) Boyao Jiang (M.Arch.II ’15) Lu Xu (M.Arch. ’19) Nidhi Subramanyam Hon Chiu Alfred To Stephen W. Jacobs Fund (M.R.P. ’14) (M.Arch.II ’15) Elvan Cobb Chenglong Zhao Portman Family (Ph.D. HAUD ’17) (M.Arch.II ’15) Graduate Student Award Susan T. Rodriguez Adna Karabegovic Mary M. Lyons Graduate Graduate Award (M.R.P. ’16) Fellowship in Architecture Morgynn Wiley Taru (M.R.P. ’15) Ethan Davis (M.Arch. ’18) (M.Arch. ’17) Kristin Ionata (M.Arch. ’18) Robert P. Liversidge III Matthew Sokol Tui Pranich and Lucilo Memorial Book Award (M.Arch.II ’16) Pena Graduate Award Petra Marar (M.L.A. ’15/ Russell Southard Travis Nissen (M.Arch. ’17) M.R.P. ’15) (M.Arch. ’18) William S. Downing Prize Thomas W. Anuntachai Vongvanij Karim Daw (B.Arch. ’15) Mackesey Award (M.Arch. ’18) Jennifer Rowe (M.R.P. ’15) Matthew L. Witte Rachel Shindman Graduate Award (M.R.P. ’15) Charles Baskerville Gary Esposito (M.Arch. ’19) Anni Zhu (M.R.P. ’15) Painting Award Michael Rapuano Neeraja Durga (M.F.A. ’15) Urban and Regional Memorial Award Connie Wong (M.F.A. ’15) Studies Academic Emily Chang (B.Arch. ’15) Achievement Award Charles Goodwin Sands Maya Tellman (B.S. URS ’15) Olive Tjaden Scholarship Memorial Award Katerina Economou Jung-Ho Sohn (B.F.A. ’15) Urban and Regional (M.Arch.Euljiro’18) Studies Community 3ga Subway Station David R. Bean Prize Guoyu Sun (M.Arch. ’18) Service Award in Fine Arts Caroline Flax (B.S. URS ’15) Paul Dickinson Prize Rebecca Allen (B.F.A. ’17) Sangga Justin Foo (B.Arch. ’18) Laureen Sampoong Andalib (B.F.A. ’17) Edward Palmer York Memorial Prize First prize: Zhou Li (B.Arch. ’19) Second Prize: Xiaotang Tang ’16 Third prize: Weixi Chen (B.Arch. ’19) Honorable mention: Birsen Basak Akman (B.Arch. ’19) Ainslie Cullen (B.Arch. ’19) Vanille Fricker (B.Arch. ’19) Gregory Keller (B.Arch. ’19) Charly Kring (B.Arch. ’19)

Students

Architecture

photo / Matt Carbone

2014–15 Student Academic Awards and Prizes

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The Pulp Canopy by Katie Donahue (M.Arch. ’15) and Mason Limke of MYKA won the Bigger than a Breadbox, Smaller than a Building competition, curated by Robert Trumbour and Aaron Willette of Khôra. The exhibition explored installations in the architectural realm.

Entrants had to further develop a previously built installation for the Boston Society of Architects gallery lobby. Donahue and Mason’s piece, which originated from its earlier form as The Pulp Wall, investigated potential applications for reconstituted cellulose fiber, or paper pulp, in architecture and design. More than 800 rolls of toilet paper were collected from airports that discard hundreds of pounds of partial rolls each week, as is common practice in many businesses with large facilities that find it more economical to replace and refill all rolls at once. This remnant paper was broken down into its fibers, pulped, and reconsidered using digital and hand-craft techniques to produce more than 4,400 triangular parts strung from one end of the lobby to the other. The Pulp Canopy was suspended across the lobby from June 17 through October 4.AAP

News18 | Fall 2015

Interim Urbanism Review for the spring option studio Interim Urbanism: The Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport Site, taught by Visiting Critic David Moon, architecture. From left, Whitney Liang (M.Arch. ’16) and Katie Donahue (M.Arch. ’15) present to reviewers including (seated, from left) Moon, Visiting Assistant Professor Sasa Zivkovic, Nahyun Hwang of N H D M, Visiting Critic Adam Frampton, Associate Professor Jeremy Foster, and Visiting Critic Julian Palacio.

News18 | Fall 2015

Faculty and Staff News Visiting Assistant Professor Iñaqui Carnicero, architecture, University of Greenwich in London, an architecture school was one of the five winners of the AIA New York Chapter facility designed by Shih-Fu Peng (B.Arch. ’89) and Róisín 2015 Housing Design Awards, cosponsored by the Boston Heneghan of Heneghan Peng Architects. Morris reviews the Society of Architects. His project, 39 Social Housing Units commentary—positive and negative—that the building has in Madrid, was selected for excellence and innovation in received in the British press. He then offers an alternative multifamily housing design. The project consists of 34 critique, which takes into account the site’s illustrious apartments, including penthouses, and features an internal buildings in their park setting, as well as the challenges structure centering around clusters of three living units per and controversies surrounding other new architecture section instead of the typical arrangement of symmetrical school buildings, and confirms that in this case, “The two apartments on either side of a hallway. 39 Social Housing missions—new building, new pedagogy . . . feed the other.”

Units in Madrid also won a Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid award in 2013. Carnicero and the other winners were Caroline O’Donnell, Edgar A. Tafel Assistant Professor honored at a symposium held at the Center for Architecture and director of the M.Arch. program, presented a paper in New York City on June 23. titled “The Order of Order: Towards an Environmental Functionalism” at the 103rd Association of Collegiate Visiting Associate Professor Bill Gaskins, art, chaired Schools of Architecture Annual Meeting on “The Expanding a panel at the annual Conference of the College Art Periphery and the Migrating Center,” in Toronto last Association on February 14, at the New York Hilton Midtown March. Her presentation appeared as an article in the paper Hotel. Titled “After Emory: Redefining Art and Art History proceedings, of the same title as the conference. Further, she in the American University,” the panel was a live think published a short story called “What These Ithacas Mean,” tank focused on posing challenging questions about the in Atlas (Akademie Schloss Solitude Publications, 2015). pedagogical, curricular, and conceptual possibilities of fine art in the context of the university and beyond. The panel’s Associate Professor Maria Park, art, designed an artwork title refers to Emory University’s decision to close their for the central subway temporary barricade, which was visual arts department in the fall of 2012. commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission in partnership with the San Francisco Municipal Associate Professor Neema Kudva, CRP, published an article, Transportation Agency. Titled Sight Plan, it is 4' x 156' and “Small Cities, Big Issues: Indian Cities in the Debates on was created from high-resolution scans of artwork reverseUrban Poverty and Inequality,” in Cities and Inequalities in a painted on Plexiglas and printed on vinyl. Park’s piece was Global and Neoliberal World (Routledge, 2015). In addition, she installed over the summer, and will be on display for a year. was nominated by the president of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future (ACSF) for the International Editorial Jenny Sabin, Wiesenberger Assistant Professor of Board of Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning, Volume Architecture, argues for an interdisciplinary approach to VI, a collection of the best planning scholarship from 300 sustainability in architecture in her article, “Transformative schools worldwide, published by Routledge. Further, she Research Practice: Architectural Affordances and won a 2015 Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Award, Crisis.” Published in the March 2015 issue of the Journal and the Spring 2016 ACSF Faculty Fellow-in-Residence of Architectural Education, the article examines four Fellowship. Kudva, along with colleagues from the colleges multidisciplinary bodies of work emerging from firms from of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Arts and Sciences, Human architecture and other fields, and argues for the necessity Ecology, and University Communications, also received the of further efforts along the same lines. Sabin was also an 2015–2016 Internationalizing the Cornell Curriculum Grant organizer of the first architect-led symposium at the 2015 for their project, Leveraging the Nilgiris Field Learning Center Materials Research Society Spring Meeting, titled “Adaptive to Internationalize Cornell Education. The grant, which is from Architecture and Programmable Matter—Next Generation the Office for the Vice Provost for International Affairs, Building Skins and Systems from Nano to Macro,” which supports development of an assessment rubric, creation was held from April 6 to 10 in San Francisco. At the meeting of learning modules for Ithaca-based courses, and a film she cochaired two sections, “Simulation and Fabrication to be made in collaboration with J. P. Sniadecki, from the Scalability” and “Fabrication Scalability and Material Department of Performing Arts, and Mariangela Mihai, a Properties I.” graduate student in film and anthropology.

An exhibit of lithographs by Associate Professor of Art Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory Gregory Page, titled Motifs from the Global Backyard, D. Medina Lasansky gave a presentation on her book appeared at Lone Star College–North Harris’s Fine Arts Archi.Pop: Mediating Architecture in Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, Gallery in Kingwood, Texas, from February 19 through 2014), along with contributors Visiting Associate Professor March 26.

Mark Morris, architecture, and Chad Randl (M.A. HAUD ’00, Ph.D. HPP ’14), on March 2, for Olin Library’s Chats in Professor Mildred Warner, CRP, whose research focuses the Stacks series. She also presented a lecture titled “The on local governments, was in the news with her work on Fascist Reinvention of the Renaissance City” for “Crosshow cities plan for aging, environmental sustainability, Disciplinary Perspectives on Urban Space: An International and economic development. She presented results from her Seminar,” at the Architecture School in Florence, Italy, in national Planning Across Generations survey at the American February. This talk was a celebration of the 10th anniversary Planning Association conference in Seattle in April 2015, of the publication of her 2004 book, The Renaissance Perfected. and again at the Urban Land Institute in Washington, DC— On March 13, she gave another talk, in Michelangelo’s where it was picked up by the Washington Post—as well as at Laurentian Library in Florence, titled “Was There an Italian a national webinar in June attended by over 400 planners Renaissance? And Whose Was It?” Her lecture was streamed from across the nation. Her research shows how planning on Florentine radio. Lasansky also spoke at the conference for aging and for children can build cities that are better “Fascismo: Making, Thinking, and Imagining History,” held for all. Research with George Homsy (Ph.D. CRP ’13) on at the University of Rochester's Department of Modern sustainability planning by U.S. municipalities was published Languages and Cultures in April. in an article titled “Cities and Sustainability: Polycentric Action and Multilevel Governance,” in the Urban Affairs Michael Manville, assistant professor, CRP, published Review (51, 1:46–63), and was referenced in the Huffington “Parking Pricing” in Parking: Issues and Policies, where it was Post on January 22. Another article, titled “Understanding selected by the editorial team as an Outstanding Author Employment Growth in the Recession: The Geographic Contribution in the 2015 Emerald Literati Network Awards Diversity of State Rescaling,” coauthored with Ph.D. for Excellence. His chapter was cited as “one of the most candidate Yuanshuo Xu, appeared in the Cambridge Journal impressive pieces of work the team has seen throughout 2014.” of Regions, Economy and Society, and was referenced in an oped published by the Albany Times Union in June.

The work of Austin+Mergold (A+M), the firm of architecture’s Assistant Professor Aleksandr Mergold During the spring semester, Professor Mary Woods, (B.Arch. ’00) and Jason Austin (B.Arch. ’00), is profiled in architecture, lectured at a new school, the School of the article “All Systems Go,” which appeared in the April Environment and Architecture, as well as at Somaya issue of Architectural Record. It focuses on A+M’s ability Kalappa Architects, both in Mumbai. She spoke about to “find unconventional beauty in conventional building Mumbai’s electrification and its architecture of the night, materials.” (See Mergold’s faculty profile on page 10.) the subject of her essay in the edited volume Cities of Light (Routledge, 2015). In addition, in April, Woods cochaired “Keeping Up with the Inigo Joneses,” an article by Visiting with Hugh Campbell, dean of the University College Associate Professor Mark Morris, architecture, appeared Dublin’s School of Architecture, the session “After Analog: in the winter 2015 issue of Log. It featured an in-depth New Perspectives on Architecture and Photography” at the critique of the new Stockwell Street building for the Society of Architectural Historians Convention in Chicago.

Cities of the Global South Reader Published Coedited by CRP Associate Professor Neema Kudva and Faranak Miraftab, Cities of the Global South Reader (Routledge Urban Reader Series, 2014) explores the field of urbanization in the developing world, with an emphasis on the historical legacies of colonialism.

Throughout the publication, editorial introductions that accompany selected texts present specific themes and summarize the state of the field. The Reader examines issues including the urban economy, basic services, infrastructure, the role of nonstate civil society–based actors, planned interventions and contestations, the role of diaspora capital, adapting to climate change, and the increasing specter of violence in a post-9/11 transnational world.AAP

O’Donnell Publishes Niche Tactics Niche Tactics: Generative Relationships Between Architecture and Site (Routledge, 2015), the first book by architecture’s Edgar A. Tafel Assistant Professor Caroline O’Donnell, explores architecture’s relationship with site and its ecological analogue— the relationship between an organism and its environment.

Including 140 drawings and photographs, Niche Tactics provides a series of case studies that investigate historical moments when relationships between architecture and site were productively intertwined. Interspersed between the case studies are texts on subjects as diverse as giraffe morphology, ugliness, and hopeful monsters.

O’Donnell is the director of the professional Master of Architecture program in the Department of Architecture, the faculty editor of the Cornell Journal of Architecture, and principal of the design studio CODA.AAP

Starting in August, Associate Professor Victoria A. Beard, CRP, will spend the next two years as the World Resources Institute (WRI) director of research for the Ross Center for Sustainable Cities in Washington, DC. WRI is a leading think tank working on environmental sustainability issues—food, water, forest, energy, climate, and cities. The Sustainable Cities Program is the largest program within the WRI. As director of research, Beard will travel to and work with 200 WRI technical staff located in China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, and Washington, DC. Beard will be the lead author of the World Sustainable Cities Report, which will bring together urban experts on the most pressing topics facing cities. Beard will also work on developing a series of sustainable city case studies, which will provide contextualized, empirical evidence that allows political leaders, policy makers, and planning practitioners to assess the transferability of best practices across urban contexts.

In addition, Beard will participate in dialogue currently underway about the United Nation’s (UN) post-2015 development agenda, which will culminate in the UN’s Habitat III conference on housing and sustainable urban development scheduled for October 2016 in Quito, Ecuador.

“My hope is that the work I do with the Sustainable Cities Program can compliment and extend some of the initiatives currently underway at Cornell,” says Beard. “WRI shares similar goals with the [Mario] Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, and Engaged Learning and Research.” Beard is a faculty fellow at all three centers.AAP

Faculty&Staff

photo / provided

B eard Appointed to World Resources Institute

21

Gensler Family Gift Names AAP NYC Executive Director Position

Foster and Ostendarp Awarded Tenure photo / provided

On June 17, CRP Professor Mildred Warner met with Costa Rica’s vice president, Ana Helena Chacón, to discuss strategies for addressing poverty among families in that country. The meeting was organized by Alvaro Salas-Castro ’14, who has been working on an ongoing collaboration to encourage students from Costa Rica to study public administration at the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs. Chacón was especially interested in Warner’s work linking economic development to childcare and the role of planning in creating more family-friendly cities. From left: Warner; Marcelo Jenkins, Costa Rica’s minister of Science, Technology, and Telecommunications; Svante Myrick ’09, mayor of Ithaca; Chacón; and Salas-Castro.AAP

Donaghy Named RSAI Fellow Lindsay France / University Photography

Robert Barker / University Photography

In May, the Cornell University Board of Trustees affirmed the promotion to associate professor with tenure for Jeremy Foster, architecture; and Carl Ostendarp, art.

Foster, whose research revolves around the multiple intersections between landscape, culture, and urbanism, taught in the Department of Landscape Architecture in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences for five years before becoming an assistant professor at AAP in 2011. His writings have appeared in Women, Modernity, & Landscape Architecture; the Journal of Landscape Architecture; the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians; and Gender, Place & Culture. He previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech.

Since joining the faculty of the Department of Art in 2000, Ostendarp has maintained a painting practice that centers on the continuing development of pictorial abstraction. Recent exhibitions include: Blanks at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York City; Everything Falls Faster than an Anvil at Pace Gallery, London; and Pop Abstraction at Garth Greenan Gallery and Fredericks & Freiser, New York City. His work is represented by the Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York City; Galerie Schmidt Maczollek, Cologne, Germany; and Carroll and Sons, Boston.

Ostendarp is the director of graduate studies for the department, and was awarded the Melinda G. Watts ’03 Prize for Undergraduate Faculty Excellence for 2015.AAP

photo / provided

A gift from M. Arthur (B.Arch. ’57) and Drucilla Gensler has created the Gensler Family Sesquicentennial Executive Director of AAP NYC. Robert Balder (B.S. URS ’89), the executive director of AAP NYC since 2011, is the first to hold the position.

“After an initial gift created the executive director position in 2011, this additional support from the Gensler family is further testament to how deeply the family cares about AAP NYC’s role in the college experience,” says Balder. “It’s an honor to be the first to hold this title.”

The gift from the Gensler family is the latest in a series of gifts that support AAP’s presence in New York City. After donating $450,000 in 2011 to fund the appointment of an executive director of AAP NYC, the Gensler Family Foundation committed an additional $500,000 in 2013. Total gifts from the Gensler family to AAP NYC exceed $1.5 million. Gensler also funded a scholarship for undergraduate architecture students in 1980, and a visiting critic program in architecture for the Ithaca campus in 1991.AAP

In late March, the Regional Science Association International (RSAI) named CRP’s Professor Kieran Donaghy a 2015 RSAI fellow.

Granted to regional scientists with “outstanding research credentials in his/her field,” RSAI fellows are distinguished scholars with a proven and recognized research record in regional science.

“I am deeply gratified and honored that the collective sum of my efforts has been deemed worthy of acknowledgment,” says Donaghy. “The list of RSAI fellows includes members of the National Academy of Sciences and Nobel Prize Laureates. I’m not sure I belong in their august company, but I’ll interlope along if I’m allowed!”

Other 2015 fellows are Raymond Florax of Purdue University and Jacques Poot of the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Donaghy will be honored at the 62nd Annual North American Meetings of the RSAI in November in Portland, Oregon.AAP News18 | Fall 2015

photo / Peter Gerakaris rendering / provided

photo / Chris Wiley

’55

’99

Eisenman Wins Topaz Medallion

Bicknell Leading Development of the Bridge at Cornell Tech

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) awarded Peter Eisenman (B.Arch. ’55), Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, the 2015 AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education.

The Topaz Medallion is the highest honor that can be bestowed on an educator in the field of architecture. In his nomination letter to the AIA, Dean Thomas R. Fisher of the University of Minnesota School of Architecture College of Design wrote, “By working with the nation’s most prestigious architecture schools, Eisenman has operated much more like a public intellectual than a workaday professor. He draws from many fields outside of architecture, including linguistics, philosophy, art, and psychoanalysis, to raise the intellectual credibility of our field.”

Eisenman has been a visiting critic at Cornell several times, and has taught at Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, The Cooper Union, and Yale, where he is currently the Charles Gwathmey Professor in Practice. He is the principal at Eisenman Architects in New York City.AAP

The Bridge, one of the centerpiece buildings of the new Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City, is slated to open in the summer of 2017.

Designed by Michael Manfredi’s (M.Arch. ’80) firm Weiss/Manfredi and owned and developed by Forest City Ratner Companies (FCR), the building aims to bring industry and academia together with the goal of advancing and commercializing new technologies.

Leading the development of the Bridge is Kate Bicknell (B.S. URS ’99), a senior vice president at FCR. Bicknell began her career as a legislative aide in Wash­ ington, DC, working for Senator Daniel Patrick Moyni­ han. She then moved to Smart Growth America, where she helped secure the passage of the Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfield Revitalization Act. She joined FCR in 2005, hoping to focus on public/private partnerships, and redevelopment work that would lead to “building strong cities.” Bicknell was largely respon­ sible for securing the partnership between the firm and Cornell Tech, and began development work on the Bridge shortly thereafter.

“The Bridge will be a first-of-its-kind space for a select group of companies to be embedded in a tech campus,” says Bicknell. “Companies at the Bridge will have the opportunity to partner with researchers and entrepreneurs to test new ideas, launch new products, start new businesses, and to find the future leaders of their companies.”

Cornell Tech will lease about one-third of the build­ ing, and the rest of the space will be leased to startups

and larger companies. FCR will collaborate with Cor­ nell Tech in the curation of potential tenants.

“There will be a mix of startups and entrepreneurs, as well as established tech companies that may have an R&D unit, or that may want to rotate teams through the space,” says Bicknell. “We want to have a continual rotation of new companies and new ideas, and creat­ ing the right ecosystem is part of it. Demo days, hack­ athons, lectures, conferences, and other special events for the tech and creative community are all part of the experience we are creating.”

Cornell Tech is at the center of New York City’s ef­ forts to expand its technology sector. Recognizing the success of Stanford University’s proximity to Silicon Valley, Cornell Tech and specifically the Bridge provide a place where the traditional barriers between industry and academia are broken down.

With that goal in mind, the approximately 230,000square-foot building features flexible workspace, loft­ like design, and unique common spaces to facilitate interactions between tenants.

“The Bridge is designed to remove the actual physi­ cal barriers to innovation,” says Bicknell. “We are pro­ viding a place that encourages the random interactions and deep collaborations that solve problems, builds partnerships, and ultimately accelerates new products to market.”AAP Rebecca Bowes

Alumni

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’03 ’89 – ’11

Peter Gerakaris

One, Two, Three AAP Alumni Win 2015–16 Rome Prizes

Commissioned to commemorate the groundbreaking of the Cornell Tech campus in New York City, Peter Gerakaris’s (B.F.A. ’03) Tropicália was an immersive, mixedmedia, site-specific installation at Gallery RIVAA, run by the Roosevelt Island Visual Art Association. Curated by Kendal Henry, the 1,000-square-foot installation covered nearly every wall of the gallery and parts of the floor.

The 2015–16 Rome Prize recipients, which were announced in April, include three AAP Alumni: Jeffrey Cody (Ph.D. CRP ’89), Javier Galindo (M.Arch. ’11), and Thaisa Way (Ph.D. HAUD ’05).

Each year, the Rome Prize is given to 30 emerging artists and scholars in the early or middle stages of their careers that represent the highest standard of excellence in the arts and humanities. Fellows spend a year at the American Academy in Rome, pursuing their work in “an atmosphere conducive to intellectual and artistic freedom, interdisciplinary exchange, and innovation.” The Rome Prize community includes fellows, residents, visiting artists and scholars, and members of academic summer programs.

Cody, who received the American Academy in Rome’s Historic Preservation and Conservation Prize, is currently a senior project specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, and will work on a project titled Conserving the City

by Understanding Its Built Landscape: The Analysis of Urban Form by Saverio Muratori, 1910–1973. Galindo, who won the James R. Lamantia, Jr. Rome Prize in Architecture, is the founder and principal of JGCH, and an associate principal at Kohn Pedersen Fox. His Rome project is titled The Created Fragment. Way, winner of the Garden Club of America Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture, is an associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington, and will work on a project titled Drawing Histories of Landscape Architecture.AAP

Created in time for the artist’s 50th reunion, a collection of pedestal-size bronze sculptures by AAP Advisory Council member Joel Perlman (B.F.A. ’65) were displayed in the Bibliowicz Family Gallery during reunion weekend in June. Perlman studied sculpture at Cornell with now-emeritus professor Jack Squier. A show of Squier’s work was simultaneously on view at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. Perlman is represented by the Loretta Howard Gallery on West 26th Street in New York City.AAP

News18 | Fall 2015

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AAP Alumni Play Prominent Role in Milan Expo Pavilions When James Biber (B.Arch. ’76) began designing the USA Pavilion for Expo 2015 in Milan, his goal was to create a building that was uniquely American and that didn’t generate huge lines of visitors waiting outside.

Since the World’s Fair opened on May 1, the 40,000square-foot American pavilion has drawn up to 32,000 people a day, and despite the crowds, there have been few queues out front. Biber said that is the result of a 40-foot-wide entrance to the structure and a flow to the building that allows people to move independently through the interactive displays.

“One of the problems with pavilions is they were becoming opaque boxes with one door in and one door out, a line outside, and a couple of movie theaters in between,” said Biber, principle of Biber Architects in New York City. “That’s a terrible model. We tried to create a leaner machine that would allow huge numbers of people to visit without queues.”

Three other AAP alumni worked with Biber to design the USA Pavilion, including Suzanne Lettieri (M.Arch. ’11), Dan Marino (B.Arch. ’12), and Jackie Krasnokutskaya (B.Arch. ’14). In addition, another AAP graduate, Qinwen Cai (M.Arch. ’08), was one of two project managers for the China Pavilion, and was joined by Shuning Fan (M.Arch. ’13) who was a member of the project team for that pavilion.

The six-month expo is focused on the theme of innovation, technology, and traditions of food. More than 120 countries are participating in the fair, and 53 nations have built stand-alone pavilions.

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Called American Food 2.0, the USA Pavilion features a massive vertical farm where more than 40 different kinds of crops are harvested weekly, a boardwalk with wood repurposed from the Coney Island Boardwalk, and a 10,000-square-foot roof terrace covered by a smart-glass canopy.

“The building has to represent America,” Biber said. “Everything about the building is honest, industrial, open, and straightforward. And it’s nearly all in motion, not unlike a farm machine.”

Cai, a project manager of the China Pavilion, trav­ eled to Milan several times to oversee construction of her country’s 32,000-square-foot building. The pavilion fea­ tures a series of exhibits beneath an undulating, floating roof, clad with 1,052 bamboo panels. Visitors enter the building by walking through a landscape of wheat that leads up to the second floor, where they can see a span of 20,000 LED lights along with a multimedia installation.

Together with the project’s lead architect, Yichen Lu, who founded Studio Link-Arc in New York City, Cai clarified the design proposal to engineers and contractors working on the pavilion and coordinated technical aspects of the project. She and Lu finalized the materials and supplies, while supervising the construction methods to ensure that they followed the intent of the design.

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“We got involved in almost every single issue that they came to us with for approval,” said Cai, a senior associate for Studio Link-Arc. “Every day there were always new issues because there are so many details and because the building is complex.”

After Expo 2015 ends on October 31, the country pavilions will be dismantled. While Cai said part of her pavilion will be rebuilt back in China, Biber said major elements of the American pavilion will be either sold or reused. AAP Sherrie Negrea 1 The USA Pavilion drew up to 32,000 people a day. photo / Saverio Lombardi Vallauri 2 Biber on the roof of the USA Pavilion. photo / Saverio Lombardi Vallauri 3 Cai in front of the China Pavilion. photo / Yichen Lu 4 Studio Link-Arc designed the China Pavilion, which was situated in a landscape of wheat. photo / Sergio Grazia

Calvin Kim (B.A./B.F.A. ’15), The Last Conception (2015), oil, enamel, and spray paint, 51" x 89.5".

News18 | Fall 2015

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