Urban Omnibus BlockParty 2012
Tuesday, February 28
A cocktail reception, art auction and benefactors’ dinner to support Urban Omnibus, the Architectural League’s online publication dedicated to defining the culture of citymaking.
Buy tickets here.

Party and Auction
St. Patrick’s Youth Center
268 Mulberry Street
6:30-8:30pm
Tickets start at $40

Benefactors’ Dinner
City Grit
38 Prince Street
8:30-10:30pm
Tickets start at $250
Dinner ticket availability is very limited.

Benefit Committee
Maya Hernandez, co-chair
Peter Mullan, co-chair
Alanna Bailey
Jake Barton
Vishaan Chakrabarti
Alyson Dick
Kim Dowdell
Dana Esposito
Carolyn Gallagher
Robert Hammond
Penny Hardy & Granger Moorhead
Paul Haydon
Andrew Hollweck
Susan Lowance
Elizabeth Lusskin
Deborah Marton
Nadia Meratla
Scott Metzner
Diana Murphy
Patricia Ornst
Neysa Pranger
Paul Proulx
Dana Sandberg
Joe Smith
Margaret Sullivan
Paul Wolf
Karen Wong
Douglas Woodward

Sponsors (list in formation)
Bernsohn & Fetner, LLC
Buro Happold
Denham Wolf
Hunter Roberts Construction Group
James Lima Planning + Development
Robert Kliment and Frances Halsband
Levien & Company
The New York Building Congress
Newmark Knight Frank
Sciame Construction  

Stay tuned for a preview of the items up for auction, coming soon…

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Left: constructing a public interest design project in Brooklyn | Right: Bryan Bell leading a workshop and presentation

Before Urban Omnibus went live, we co-hosted a weekend-long event that invited teams to design a project in the public interest and build it from found materials in two days. The event was led by Bryan Bell, on the occasion of the launch of his 2008 book Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism, which surveys the field of “creative design carried out in the service of the greater public and the greater good.” Bell, founder of Design Corps and co-founder of SEED, has been working towards a better understanding of how design can affect communities and serve the under-served for over twenty years.

His most recent initiative, The Public Interest Design Institute is devoted to educating architects about how to fold public interest design into their practices. Starting next month, the Institute will be hosting two-day training events at universities throughout the country. According to Bell, despite increasing interest from designers, professional schools of architecture have not focussed on equipping students with the unique skills and knowledge relevant to public interest design. Therefore, specific training is urgently needed. With the support of the Surdna Foundation and the Architectural League, the Public Interest Design Institute will hold one of these training sessions at Yale University in January. For more information about the event or to register, click here.

Bell will lead the event with the support of instructors dedicated to public service from around the world, utilizing case studies that adhere to the standards and evaluation metrics set forth by SEED. Participants will earn certification in the SEED process, which means they will learn how public interest design is re-shaping the design profession, how to find new clients embedded within communities, how to identify new fee sources and structures, and how to measure and maximize its positive social, economic and environmental impact on communities.

Public Interest Design Institute at Yale University
January 13, 9am – January 14, 5pm, 2012
New Haven, CT
For more information, click here.

Bryan Bell is the founder of Design Corps, founder of the Public Interest Design Institute, and a co-founder of SEED. Bell has supervised the Structures for Inclusion lecture series for ten years which presents best practices in community-based design. He has published two collections of essays on the topic, Bell has lectured and taught at numerous schools including the Rural Studio with Samuel Mockbee. He has received an AIA National Honor Award in Collaborative Practice. His work has been exhibited in the Venice Biennale and the Cooper Hewitt Museum Triennial. He was a Harvard Loeb Fellow in 2010-11 and a co-recipient of the 2011 AIA Latrobe Prize which is focused on public interest design.

This week, two exhibitions opened at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) that celebrate the evolving legacy of Manhattan’s street grid. In one of the Museum’s ground floor galleries, urban historian Hilary Ballon has curated The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, a historical show that celebrates the 200th anniversary of the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan for New York through an astonishing collection of the maps, drawings and documents that moved the plan from a bold idea to a defining reality of New York. Upstairs, The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan, a display of eight proposals by architects — curated by Gregory Wessner, the Architectural League’s Special Projects Director — showcases a wide and provocative range of speculative futures for the grid. These proposals are the winning entries to an international ideas competition, organized by the Architectural League in collaboration with MCNY and Architizer.

This Saturday, three of the competition’s jurors will join Wessner for a panel discussion that will reflect on themes that emerged from the over 120 entries, the implications of the eight winning proposals and questions raised by the Call for Ideas. Taking the consistent adaptations to the grid over the past two centuries as a point of departure, these questions include: What new possibilities for the grid still exist? What can we expect for the city’s future and how will it be shaped and reflected by the street grid? What kinds of ideas as bold and visionary as the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan might New York undertake?

The Unfinished Grid: Speculations for Manhattan
Amale Andraos, Mark Robbins, and Ken Smith, moderated by Gregory Wessner
Saturday, December 10, 2011
4:00 p.m.
Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue

Amale Andraos is co-founder and partner of Work Architecture Company. Recent projects include the winning competition entry for a new cultural center on New Holland Island in Saint Petersburg, Russia; a museum extension for the Blaffer Museum, Houston; a branch library for Kew Gardens Hills in Queens; and the first Edible Schoolyard New York City with chef Alice Waters. WORKac’s entry for the redesign of Hua Qiang Bei Road, was recently awarded first place in the international competition for the redesign of Shenzhen’s busiest shopping street.

Ken Smith is principal of Ken Smith Landscape Architect. His background and training is in landscape architecture and the fine arts. Recent projects include the East River ferry landings, New York City; a rooftop garden for the Museum of Modern Art; and a major urban park for El Toro Marine Base in Orange County, California.

Mark Robbins is the Dean of Syracuse University School of Architecture. He was previously Director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts and Curator for Architecture at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Gregory Wessner is Special Projects Director for the Architectural League and the curator of The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan. He was curator of League exhibitions The City We Imagined/The City We Made: New New York 2001-2010 and New New York: Fast Forward.

Co-sponsored by the Museum of the City of New York and the New York Public Library.

Tickets
Tickets are $6 for League members and members of the museum; $8 for students and seniors; $12 for all others. Tickets include Museum admission. League members may register online at www.mcny.org and enter code AL1210 upon checkout for discounted rate.  For more information or to reserve by phone, please call 917-492-3395.

Top image: Projects in The Unfinished Grid (clockwise from top left) — The Informal Grid (Isaiah King, Ryan Neiheiser, Giancarlo Valle); The Plaid (Architecture Commons: Eric Ho, Rick Lam); Tabula Fluxus (Group Han Associates New York: Myung Kweon Park, Yikyu Choe, Michael Chaveriat); Flow My Tears, The Commissioners Said (GHILARDI + HELLSTEN ARKITEKTER: Franco Ghilardi, Ellen Hellsten, Espen Vatn, Erik Stenman, Einar Rodhe); 6 1/4 Avenue (Ksestudio: Kyriakos Kyriakou, Sofia Krimizi, assisted by Yubi Park, Jennifer Endozo, Inti Rojanasopondist, Pauline Caubel); NYCity2 (Fotis Sagonas, Ioannis Oikonomou); Dissociative New York (Joshua Mackley, Mathew Ford); Projective Exceptions (Grant Alford, assisted by Spencer Lindstrom).

When we spoke to landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh in December 2009 about Brooklyn Bridge Park, just before the first phase of the project opened to the public, he spoke about what it means to design something that continues to live and grow, and how this particular site offered an opportunity to completely reimagine what parks should be in today’s cities. Next week, on Tuesday, November 22, at 7pm, Van Valkenburgh will elaborate on his ideas about design, ecology and landscape across a variety of scales and locations, in “Parks, a Campus, and Three Summer House Gardens.” The talk, organized by the Architectural League and co-sponsored by the Cooper Union, will be followed by a conversation with Kate Orff, partner of Scape/Landscape Architecture and Vice President for Landscape at the League. Tickets are free for League members; $15 for non-members. Read on for more information (check archleague.org for the latest about the event):

Current Work
Michael Van Valkenburgh, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates
“Parks, a Campus, and Three Summer House Gardens”
Introduced and moderated by Kate Orff
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
7:00pm
The Great Hall, The Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street
1.5 CEUs

Michael Van Valkenburgh will present the recent work of his firm, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA). Based in Brooklyn and Cambridge, MVVA is a landscape architecture firm, which works on projects in scale from the city to the campus to the garden. MVVA’s commissions have sought to achieve an “ecological urbanism,” with projects such as the Master Plans for Brooklyn Bridge Park and Wellesley College, and built work like Mill Race Park and Allegheny Riverfront Park.

The office, led by its three principals, Laura Solano, Matthew Urbanski, and Michael Van Valkenburgh with a staff of 65, works closely with urban planners, architects, engineers, and ecologists. The firm’s projects have received numerous honors, including the ASLA Design Medal from the American Society of Landscape Architects; the Brendan Gill Prize from the Municipal Art Society of New York City; Progressive Architecture Awards; and awards from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Park Service, and the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada. MVVA has also won multiple high-profile design competitions including Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House, the Lower Don Lands project in Toronto, and The City + The Arch + The River competition for St. Louis and East St. Louis. Van Valkenburgh received the 2003 National Design Award in Environmental Design from the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and was the 2010 recipient of the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Van Valkenburgh earned a B.S. in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University’s College of Agriculture, and a M.F.A. in Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently the Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Van Valkenburgh teaches landscape design as well as the use of plants as design material. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the American Academy of Landscape Architects.

Kate Orff is a partner of Scape/Landscape Architecture and is the Vice President for Landscape of the Architectural League of New York.

Tickets 
Tickets are free for League members; $15 for non-members. Members may reserve a ticket by e-mailing: rsvp@archleague.org. Member tickets will be held at the check-in desk; unclaimed tickets will be released fifteen minutes after the start of the program. Non-members may purchase tickets here.

Organized by the Architectural League of New York. Co-sponsored by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union. AIA and New York State continuing education credits are available.

Video from the September 2010 Urban Omnibus feature Park as Process: Brooklyn Bridge Park.

This week, the Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC) and the Architectural League are pleased to announce the Making Room Symposium, to be held on November 7 at the Japan Society. Buy your tickets today.

Making Room Symposium
Monday, November 7, 2011
8:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Japan Society
333 East 47th Street
4.5 HSW CEUs

Making Room Afterparty in Nolita
Wine, hors d’oeuvres, and live jazz
6:00 p.m.
Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral Youth Center
263 Mulberry Street

For the latest information about this event, click here.

New York has an incredibly diverse population that lives in incredibly diverse ways. Yet the city’s housing, much of which was produced in the 20th century, does not meet the needs of a 21st century population. Households across the economic spectrum – from graduate students to senior citizens, extended families to multiple roommates, single professionals to working artists – are compelled to improvise their living arrangements in housing that can be illegal or unsafe. What New Yorkers need are more housing choices.

Making Room is a research and advocacy project initiated by the Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC) to increase the range of options in New York’s housing market. Through its research, CHPC identified ways in which current housing regulations and standards in New York constrain the range of choices the market can offer, particularly for single-person households, shared dwellings and multi-generational households, through restrictions on unit size, subdivisions of existing units and definitions of who may jointly occupy units. To build on its research, CHPC asked the Architectural League to join with it in a design study to propose and evaluate new types of housing that might better match the contemporary demographic make-up of New York and how New Yorkers choose to live now.

The Making Room symposium will present innovative ideas produced by teams of architects commissioned by CHPC and the League, and in-depth discussion of their proposals by government officials, international architects and other experts. Making Room will point the ways forward to introduce more legal and safe options into New York City’s housing market. At the end of the day, the Making Room “after-party” will provide an opportunity for further informal discussion with the day’s presenters and others from across the spectrum of the housing and real estate communities.

Tickets
To buy tickets, click here.
Design Symposium (breakfast and lunch included) $150; Evening reception, $100; Discount rate for both events, $225. Student rate, $50 for both events (with current ID). There is no additional discount for Architectural League members. This event has limited capacity; to ensure a ticket, please register by October 31st. Tickets will be available at the door, space permitting.

Featuring presentations of work by
Stan Allen & Rafi Segal – Principal, Stan Allen Architect and Dean, Princeton University School of Architecture; Founder, Rafi Segal Architecture Urbanism
Deborah Gans – Principal, Gans Studio and professor, Pratt Institute School of Architecture
Peter Gluck – Principal, Peter Gluck and Partners Architects
Jonathan Kirschenfeld – Principal, Jonathan Kirschenfeld Architects
Ted Smith – Principal, Smith & Others

With discussions of the designs presented and related policy issues by
Matthew Blesso - President, Blesso Properties
David Bragdon – Director, Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability
Azby Brown – Founder, Future Design Institute, Tokyo
David Burney – Commissioner, NYC Department of Design and Construction
Seth Diamond – Commissioner, NYC Department of Homeless Services
Alex Garvin - Principal, Alex Garvin and Associates
Rosalie Genevro – Executive Director, Architectural League of New York
Linda Gibbs – Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, City of New York
Mark Ginsberg – Partner, Curtis + Ginsberg Architects
Amie Gross – President, Amie Gross Architects
Vicente Guallart - Founder, Guallart Architects and Chief Architect, City of Barcelona
Rosanne Haggerty - President, Community Solutions
Graham Hill – Founder, treehugger.com
Robert LiMandri – Commissioner, NYC Department of Buildings
Jerilyn Perine – Executive Director, Citizens Housing & Planning Council
Mark Strauss – Senior Partner, FXFOWLE Architects
Mathew Wambua – Commissioner, NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development
Tom Wargo – Director of Zoning, NYC Department of City Planning

Making Room has been made possible through a generous grant to CHPC from the Charles H. Revson Foundation and the support of the CHPC Board of Directors, the Lavanburg Foundation, the estate of Marian R. Naumburg, Edison Properties, and the Japan Society of New York.

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New York Next panel (L to R): Guy Nordenson, Rob Rogers, Betty Chen, Richard Olcott and Claire Weisz

Last week, a group of leading New York City designers met to discuss the future of New York City at New York Next: The Future City, hosted by the Architectural League and Architectural Record. The panel consisted of Betty Chen, currently a member of the New York City Planning Commission, formerly the Vice-President for Planning, Design and Preservation for the Trust for Governors Island; Guy Nordenson, of Guy Nordenson and Associates Structural Engineers and Commissioner and Secretary of the New York City Public Design Commission; Richard Olcott, founding partner and design principal at Ennead Architects and former member of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission from 1996 to 2007; Rob Rogers, principal of Rogers Marvel Architects, a firm whose portfolio includes streetscape design for Manhattan’s financial district, and flood mitigation strategies and street furniture for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority; and Claire Weisz, founding partner of WXY Architecture + Urban Design and adjunct professor of planning at the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at NYU.

The conversation was organized without a moderator, allowing the panelists to pose questions to one another. Their discussion revolved around questions of the physical city — In what kind of city do we want to live? Who decides what kind of city ours will become? — as well as questions of pacing, framed by their own experience with major redevelopment projects across the city over the last decade. The panel set out to define what constitutes the public realm, as well as the responsibilities of both public and private entities to that public realm.

Guy Nordenson opened up the discussion with the question, “Is privatization a good thing? Or should the public sector take over?” Nordenson situated himself as undecided. He referred to a recent New York Times article that claimed that the government pays more when using private contractors they they do when using government workers, but also noted examples of particularly successful public/private partnerships around the city, such as the Central Park Conservancy. Other answers varied: Richard Olcott cited issues of capital, and the private sector’s ability to raise funds where the public sector can’t. Rob Rogers, speaking specifically about New York City, claimed that the major boon of the last decade of building in New York City was the high skill level of public sector staffs: a high quality client begets a high quality project. Claire Weisz added that New York is the right kind of city, with not just an educated city government, but an educated and involved populace. Ultimately, we hope for a well educated, well meaning, capable government, but we have to be prepared to make design decisions without one.

Betty Chen’s questions — “Is there a way for architects and engineers to play more of a role in setting the public agenda? Are there other opportunities not generated by the traditional client model?” — led the discussion to one of timing and environment. According to Guy Nordenson, new public design ideas need to have a public sector champion to become institutionalized. The consensus of the panel was that the major success of the Bloomberg administration has been its ability to institute long term, visionary planning and policies and to institutionalize progressive ideas about what kind of city New York should be in the future.

Rob Rogers and Richard Olcott asked questions regarding the widespread attention on the public realm that has been generated by the World Trade Center site, whether that has led to a more interested and more involved public and, in a more disciplinary light, how it has changed how architects work. Betty Chen answered with a fear of complacency: New Yorkers are excited about their city, but does that excitement lead to satisfaction with the status quo, and thus a lack of urgency to push the city forward? According to Chen, designers have the training and the imagination, and therefore the responsibility, to look at the urban fabric and show the rest of the city its potential.

A surprising moment of consensus on the future of the city came when the question was asked, “What is the most urgent civic design issue facing New York today?” Across the panel, there was a call for further activation of the city’s waterways, specifically through reinvestment in a ferry network, to engage our “sixth borough” and alleviate our traffic problems.

The panel opened up for questions from the audience. League Executive Director Rosalie Genevro stayed on the topic of city transit by asking about what can be done to resolve the conflicts and frustrations that arise from, as an example, the city’s subways being controlled by a State agency. A State agency is less capable of responding to the needs of the primary users, less able to act nimbly. The question harkened back to Guy Nordenson’s first question, in that it asks how large an active government agency can be before it is no longer able to be responsive to it’s citizenry. Rob Rogers suggested that the need to wrest back control and funding extends beyond the MTA, using education as another prime example. Richard Olcott pointed to the mayors of Los Angeles, Newark and San Francisco as examples of how to think regionally, without looking to their States for help, and suggested that approach as a model for New York City in disentangling itself from the State as much as possible. Claire Weisz seconded the need for regional thinking, citing the US Northwest as leading the way, but also acknowledged that some of the State/City divide is an issue of timing and balance: there was a time when the city was less capable, Battery Park City needed the State to step in, and there are still circumstances in which it makes sense for the State to take control. It is more about how to work within those constraints tactically, using state or federal capabilities when necessary.

There was, all around the table, a real sense of apprehension about what could come out of the next administration. When the Bloomberg administration leaves, who will take over? What kind of city will they want New York City to be? And will they be capable of, or even interested in, instituting the kind of long ranging, forward thinking policies that the Bloomberg administration promoted? We’ll have to wait and see. But the panelists agreed, regardless of what’s next, we have to be willing to challenge and reimagine the status quo, drive the conversation and demand quality planning and design in dialogue about our public realm.

Jessica Cronstein is a designer and writer interested in the point at which the social, cultural and physical growth of a city intersect. She has just completed her M.Arch at Rice University and lives in New York City.

New York Next: The Future City
Betty Chen, Guy Nordenson, Richard Olcott, Rob Rogers, and Claire Weisz
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
6:30 p.m.
McGraw-Hill
1221 Avenue of the Americas, 50^th Floor
1.5 CEUs

Over the last decade a new generation of architects and engineers has helped guide New York City’s development, through significant public projects produced by their practices and through work with public commissions and agencies.  Five of these influential designers—Betty Chen, Guy Nordenson, Richard Olcott, Rob Rogers, and Claire Weisz – will discuss the city’s trajectory since 2001 and look at the issues, and neighborhoods, that will demand attention in the coming years.

Architect Betty Chen is a member of the New York City Planning Commission and was until recently the Vice-President for Planning, Design and Preservation for the Trust for Governors Island.

Guy Nordenson is a partner of Guy Nordenson and Associates Structural Engineers and professor at Princeton, and has served as Commissioner and Secretary of the New York City Public Design Commission since 2006.

Richard Olcott is a founding partner and design principal at Ennead Architects, and a member of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission from 1996 to 2007.

Rob Rogers is a principal of Rogers Marvel Architects; recent New York projects include security and streetscape design for Manhattan’s financial district and flood mitigation strategies and street furniture for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Recent projects of Claire Weisz’s firm, WXY Architecture + Urban Design, include the Zipper bench system in Peter Minuit Plaza and public realm plans for Astor Place and Canal Street.

New York Next: The Future City is held in conjunction with the publication of the September Architectural Record, a special issue devoted to New York in the decade since 9/11, when a new focus on superior architecture and urban design helped fuel the revitalization of the city. New York Next: The Future City is co-sponsored by the Architectural League of New York and Architectural Record. Support for the program has been provided by Trespa.

Tickets are required for admission to League programs. Tickets are free for League members; $15 for non-members. To reserve a ticket e-mail: rsvp@archleague.org. Tickets will be held at the check-in desk; unclaimed tickets will be released fifteen minutes after the start of the program.

League programs are made possible, in part, by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

Photo: Courtesy of Architectural Record

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Tickets are now on sale for the Architectural League’s 2011 Beaux Arts Ball! The Ball, an annual benefit for the programs of the League (that includes Urban Omnibus), is an event not to be missed. Each year, the event is held in an architecturally-significant space that is re-invented and re-imagined, for one night only, by a team of creative young designers. Check out photos from past events here to get a taste of the unforgettable environments and spaces that have played host to the party in recent years. Buy your tickets today, and come dance, eat, drink and chat with us on September 17th at the Brooklyn Army Terminal!

Beaux Arts Ball 2011: Transport
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Brooklyn Army Terminal
140 58th Street
Brooklyn, New York
9pm to 1am

Environment by Leong Leong with Jiminie Ha
Music by A R P and Jon Santos
Drinks and light fare
Dress: Loading Dock Chic

Tickets
$75 Contributor
$150 Patron
To purchase tickets or for more information, click here.
UPDATE: SOLD OUT! Tickets are no longer available for the Beaux Arts Ball.

About the Brooklyn Army Terminal
Designed by Cass Gilbert (one of the founders, in 1881, of the Architectural League), the Brooklyn Army Terminal opened in September 1919 and was the largest military supply base in the United States through World War II. Set on 95 acres on the waterfront in Sunset Park, the complex of buildings was built using girderless, steel-reinforced, concrete slabs. At the time of its construction, its system of 96 centrally-controlled elevators was the largest of its kind in the country. The atrium, a soaring volume of 4 million cubic feet bisected by railroad tracks that carried soldiers in and out of the building, is lined with staggered concrete balconies from which supplies were loaded and unloaded by mobile cranes that ran along the roofline. The Brooklyn Army Terminal reached the pinnacle of its fame in 1958 when Elvis Presley was deployed to Germany from there, an event that attracted thousands of fans and photojournalists. In 1981, the City of New York bought the Brooklyn Army Terminal from the federal government. Today it is home to a diverse mix of high tech, cultural, and financial services companies.

Image: Brooklyn Army Terminal as photographed in October 1949 by Andreas Feininger. (Courtesy of Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)