BLDG 92, the new museum and visitors center for the Brooklyn Navy Yard that opened last month, offers the general public an opportunity to look behind a walled-off stretch of the Brooklyn waterfront between Flushing Avenue and Wallabout Bay that has played a pivotal role in US naval and military history since its founding in 1801. The Navy Yard, which was one of the first five shipyards in the United States, saw its peak during World War II when over 70,000 employees were based at the site, a workforce that eventually shrunk to less than 10,000 in the years before its official closing in 1966. [The closing of the Brooklyn Navy Yard was the result of the same cost-cutting measures that led to the decommissioning of the Brooklyn Army Terminal. –Ed.] In 1971, the Yard reopened as a City-owned industrial park, which today has 230 tenants and over 5,000 employees and is in the midst of a rejuvenation and redevelopment effort led by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC).

BLDG 92 inhabits the 1857 Marine Commandant’s house, originally designed by Thomas Ustick Walter and fully restored with a 20,000-square-foot addition by Beyer Blinder Belle and workshop/apd. The exterior of the addition is impressive, and recalls the building’s shipbuilding history in the image adorning the perforated metal façade. The interior, however, is much simpler, more modest in its approach. The clean white walls and metal detailing clearly delineate it from the wood and brick historic space — although so much of that interior is covered by exhibition material that you can easily forget that the building is 154 years old. As part of the new green building initiative at the Yard, BLDG 92 is aiming for LEED Platinum certification, and the BNYDC is working hard to share that goal with the public. Upon entering the museum, you’re given instructions for a “Sustainability Scavenger Hunt” that leads you around the building and grounds, to eighteen stations that highlight specific sustainability features. It’s an engaging way to introduce green building principles to children, and a large part of the BLDG 92 educational mission seems to cater to a young audience. BNYDC has partnered with the Brooklyn Historical Society to provide curriculum materials for students in all grades, tours are provided for schools during the week, and free learning materials are provided on the BLDG 92 website to compliment these visits.

The inaugural exhibit, Brooklyn Navy Yard: Past, Present and Future, examines the 165-year history of the Yard. On the first floor, you find a chronological overview of the history of Brooklyn, the Navy Yard, and relevant US military activity, along with a section dedicated to how military innovations have influenced mass-market product design. The second floor delves more into the history of naval ship building, and highlights a few of the major vessels constructed at the Navy Yard and elsewhere in Brooklyn. Two mutoscopes on display – which remind me of the classic ‘80s viewfinder toy – allow you to watch a slide show of sorts of a dry-dock in action. The third floor of the museum also houses “Gallery 92,” which will host rotating, temporary shows. Currently on view is an exhibit curated by Christopher Anderson, a Yard tenant and war photojournalist, in memory of his friend Tim Hetherington who was killed in April 2011 while documenting the Libyan revolution. The fourth floor features an outpost of the Cobble Hill cafe Ted & Honey, and a seating area wrapped by a terrace that offers views overlooking the Yard.

The mission of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at BLDG 92 is not limited to education and sustainability. The community center and museum serves as a way for the BNYDC to maintain good will with the surrounding community in the face of contentious debate about the redevelopment of the site — the preservation of Admiral’s Row, a series of historic houses most of which will be razed to make way for a large supermarket, is just one example — and to promote the viability of industry-led development. It will be interesting to see how the future growth and reinvention of the Yard is represented in the museum’s programs. But, from this first look, BLDG 92 has the potential to be an excellent addition to the cultural landscape of Brooklyn and to engage the local community in ways the Navy Yard of years prior was unable to do.

Mutoscopes at BLDG 92 | All photos by Katie Stapleton

Katie Stapleton is a licensed architect currently working at Kliment Halsband Architects. She is particularly interested in the relationship between architecture and [German] politics and interim architectural installations in an urban context. She is a former project associate for Urban Omnibus.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

As Above, So Below | Photo courtesy of Bik Van der Pol

It is not often that one think about emptiness in New York. In a highly dense city, void inevitably raises questions about the production, ownership and use of space. Elements of Composition, a two-part project presented by the Rotterdam-based artist collective Bik Van der Pol, exhorts us to (re-)evaluate these issues. The project was one of nine commissioned artists’ projects about specific regional and historic concerns presented as part of Living as Form, an exhibition and series of public programs organized by Creative Time that explored a vast array of socially engaged art. [See a review of Living as Form on UO here. -Ed.] Elements of Composition was comprised of a public, site-specific installation in two parking lots adjacent to the Essex Street Market, and a series of daily walking tours around the Lower East Side led by urban planners, architects and activists. The walks were meant to help visitors contemplate the history and future of the neighborhood in the context of its built and its vacant spaces.

I attended Bik Van der Pol’s introductory tour and Todd Rouhe’s Common Circular walk. Both activities explored the past, present and future of the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) and its surroundings by walking participants through the space. The area covers five plots of land near the Williamsburg Bridge, between Grand and Delancey Streets, acquired by New York as part of a 1965 urban renewal plan to tear down existing tenements and develop low-income housing. In 1967, 1,852 families were displaced with the promise of a new housing development, but the plots have sat empty for 40 years, used only as open-air parking lots, due to lack of investment and a conflict of interests between developers, the city and the community. But this year, CB3 and the City Council approved development guidelines for the site, and preparations are being made for a 9-month environmental assessment process. To help us understand more about the history, future plans and concerns surrounding SPURA, Bik Van der Pol co-founders Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol compiled a booklet of anonymous interviews with developers, anthropologists, local residents and more, which they made available to the general public and which informed their series of walking tours.

Todd Rouhe | Common Circular walk, Elements of Composition | Photo by Lucía Seijo

Architect and local resident Todd Rouhe, during his walk, described “the failure of a housing model,” referencing the 1972 demolition of St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe as a milestone in the public perception of this type of project. He also cited the Kerner Commission report of 1968, which recommended significant investment in affordable housing as one course of action to combat racial inequality and urban violence. SPURA has its origins in this belief. As we walked, the visual impact of its empty lots heightened our awareness of the aftermaths of a failed paradigm, and the consequences of unresolved disagreements between community stakeholders, developers and government representatives. We also considered how a neighborhood recovers when a housing model fails, as Rouhe described the present-day efforts to activate SPURA’s vacant space, welcome back former tenants and create local jobs, made by Manhattan Community Board 3, GOLES (Good Old Lower East Side neighborhood association) and others.

On their walking tour, Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol also spoke about how competing interests can influence the urban void, this time using Bernard Tschumi’s Blue Building as an example. There, emptiness was not perceived as a dearth, but as monetary value – through air rights. From nothingness, a commodity is being created. The Blue building obtained air from its neighbors in order to build higher. As we walked through the high-end condominium, the apparent dissonance with the neighborhood’s aesthetics and spirit confirmed that these transactions are not made to benefit the community. So, we questioned, who is involved when the urban void is used for economic gain?

Terrace of the Blue Building | Photo courtesy of Bik Van der Pol

Framing Elements of Composition was “As Above, So Below,” a text installation painted on the surface of the parking lots, visible from the ground, though most legible from above. The installation aimed to imprint the concerns addressed by this project into the history of the Lower East Side through its documentation in the Google Maps archive. The abstract phrase acted as a visual claim for SPURA. “As Above, So Below,” encourages us to consider all the elements that compose the urban fabric; including the ones that have been erased, are hidden or remain unknown.

The artists of Bik Van der Pol advocate for action at the SPURA site backed by an understanding of its history. During the walking tours, we approached the materiality and immateriality of empty real estate, and the ways in which monetary value and social factors influence developers and city agencies as they determine the spatial distribution of our built environment. It surprised me the little I knew about the processes behind the shaping of neighborhoods. In the spirit of Living as Form (not to mention the recent events of Occupy Wall Street), Elements of Composition made clear that the community needs to be a critical force for pursuing the integrity of the built environment.

As Above, So Below sample letter in SPURA parking lot | Photo courtesy of Bik Van der Pol

Lucía Seijo is an independent contributor to projects that approach the built environment through art. She has collaborated with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Columbia University’s Latin Lab. She is originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

When Creative Time’s latest exhibition Living As Form opened at the historic Essex Street Market on September 24th, it wasn’t without context. Just four months earlier, the Festival of Ideas for the New City brought scores of people to the nearby Bowery to think about urban spaces, generating new notions full of imagination and creativity. Then, exactly a week prior to the exhibition’s opening, the occupation of Wall Street began in downtown Manhattan, demanding change that would halt the growing division of wealth in America. Somewhere between the more whimsical aspects of the Festival of Ideas and the very real outrage of the 99% stood Living As Form, an examination of socially engaged art, what Creative Time Chief Curator Nato Thompson has called a move “away from representation to participation.” With the growing momentum of the zeitgeist, he and 25 curators gathered 20 years’ worth of international civic works, new commissions and a motley schedule of events — more than 100 in total — that “blur the forms of art and everyday life.”

The collected works served as an archive — and were even displayed in industrial gray shelving — of some of the most effective projects in social art, from developing an alternative currency still in use today in Ithaca, New York (Ithaca HOURs) to physically reviving and re-purposing an inner-city neighborhood of Houston, Texas (Project Row Houses). Because each project carried with it a significant amount of background, trying to make a way through this archive was difficult, and, unfortunately, it seemed that the conspicuous projects garnered most of the attention, like Jeremy Deller’s “The Battle of Orgreave,” a video re-enactment of a violent clash between protesting miners and local police in rural England.

Installation by Megawords | Photo via megawordsmagazine.com

The newly commissioned works were some of the more accessible, including Surasi Kusolwong’s “Golden Ghost (The Future Belongs To),” a mass of industrial thread waste in which golden necklaces had been hidden and where children played and couples took pictures of each other, and the hangout spot created by Megawords, where one could put on a record and lounge against pillows on the floor. Bartering workshops and a barter advisor (by Our Goods) as well as Time/Bank — where people could advertise their “haves” and “needs” — served to give visitors direct interaction with and useful methods of challenging standard forms of living.

While no show about civic works could ignore cultural context, Living As Form succeeded in understanding its physical place. Not only was the layout of the space (designed by Common Room) highly approachable, constructed with cinder blocks, foam cubes and neon lights, but awareness of the neighborhood also played a central role. The exhibition hosted a series of walking tours that explored the streets of the Lower East Side and Chinatown, and guides (activists and artists alike) pointed out a building’s physical feature or a contested property and encouraged walkers to listen to the soundscape or understand the complexity of SPURA, the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, large parking lots adjacent to the market that currently sit as the largest undeveloped tract of city-owned land south of 96th Street. SPURA, in fact, was a focal point of the exhibition, where commissioned artist Bik Van der Pol installed large text that read “As Above / So Below” to call attention to the stalemated evolution of the area.

Bik Van der Pol’s Elements of Composition | Photo by Sam Horine, courtesy of Creative Time

Like a mist, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement permeated almost every aspect of Living As Form. People on walking tours talked about it between sites, those in the space casually made references to it, and an area for painting OWS protest signs was continually in use. For many, each piece in the archive felt like a guide for how to approach the changes being called for by the movement. Many involved with the show were compelled to action and a conversation at the Creative Time Summit (which ran in conjunction with the exhibition’s opening) called “Manifestations of Resistance” was scrapped by both the speakers and the audience, who marched instead to Wall Street to join in support. Many of these same people met the following day to discuss meaningful forms of involvement, out of which came the Occupied Wall Street Journal and the Occupennial, among other projects.

The palpable public archive in and events surrounding Living As Form (which was free to attend) was a refreshing change from some of the more insular (pay-to-attend), sometimes fanciful, idea-generating events of late. Here was a collaborative, thoughtful effort, executed in real terms and providing tools for action. Obviously, the conversation on social change as art is far from over, and Creative Time expects to publish a book with MIT Press (now on pre-order) in January 2012 with new essays and insights.

Living as Form | Ted Purves and Elyse Mallouk presenting Landfill (thelandfill.org) | Photo by Sam Horine, courtesy of Creative Time

Mercedes Kraus is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. She co-founded and publishes Womanzine and has worked to engage the public in the built environment at both Van Alen Institute and the Institute for Urban Design. She loves pizza, outer space, and .gifs of both. 

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Photo by Yael Friedman

Concentrating the mind and standing still often seem two of the most elusive experiences in New York. In To a Great City, the second edition of the Guggenheim’s multidisciplinary stillspotting nyc program that ran from September 15-18 and 22-25, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and the NYC- and Oslo-based architectural firm Snøhetta sought to provide New Yorkers with opportunities to do just that. At five sites located along the perimeter of Ground Zero, Pärt’s minimalist, monastic compositions permeated a series of spaces where large white balloons were the only physical alterations to already naturally seductive spots. The installation was a clear ode to New York, and the tenth anniversary of 9/11 was both physically and psychologically just beyond the immediate experience, providing a quiet and elegant elegy.

The recommended route took the visitor from the Labyrinth at the Battery, then onto a ferry to the two sound installations on Governors Island, back on the ferry to the Woolworth Building and then, in one of the best orchestrated (so to speak) finales to a project, up an elevator to the 46th floor of 7 World Trade Center and a 360-degree-view of the island of Manhattan and its surrounds.

Photo by Yael Friedman

At the entrance to the Labyrinth — a small, circular, grassy maze built to commemorate 9/11 on its first anniversary — visitors were provided with iPods programmed with an Arvo Pärt composition. As one concentrated on the maze, and the large white balloon in the middle of it, Pärt’s music completed the task of shutting out surrounding sounds, people and movement. Of course, it is impossible to forget you are actually in New York, and that was never the intention. One brief look up and the skyscrapers are still, reassuringly, there. Some visitors sat on nearby benches, listening to the music and gazing at the big white balloon and at others navigating the maze. Perhaps the most valuable experience these installations provided is one very rare for the modern city dweller — a place and time for such secular meditation.

Photo by Kristopher McKay, copyright The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

The space where this was most obviously and effectively borne out was in the neo-Gothic Woolworth Building, whose famous gorgeous lobby was built to resemble the inside of a Gothic cathedral. Visitors were seated on the main staircase and faced out, looking onto Broadway, watching the traffic and the pedestrians while listening to an especially Gregorian-sounding score. The original Gothic cathedrals made their celestial claims persuasive through the use of architectural elements that appealed to people’s emotions — high vaulted ceilings, large windows pouring in light and a daunting, humbling scale — and the Woolworth Building shares many of these elements. But the combined experience of the five sites and installations, including the time commitment (visiting all five sites took at least 3-4 hours), the ecclesiastical-sounding music, the heightened awareness of your personal meditations within the surroundings of an overwhelmingly-large city, all effectively formed a sort of modern secular cathedral.

The sites on Governors Island did veer from this effect and seemed to have a program all their own, quite apart from the rest. The effort to get to Governors Island, the exploration of the multi-chambered underground cavern of the first site, with the slightly melodramatic music, did not provide the feeling that one has entered a place and left the rest of life behind. Instead, a more directed and anxious feeling of searching for the right way to experience the space and sound emerged, perhaps defying the objectives of the project. The other site on Governors Island, a grassy hill with the view of the city ahead, was lovely but reminded one that a long line and a boat ride back across the river awaited.

The final installation, on the 46th floor of 7WTC, was indeed a crescendo and one or two visitors even squealed in delight as the doors to the elevator opened and they took in the view — a full 360-degree view of New York City, with the Empire State Building in a seeming straight line to 7WTC. After the somber music, gilded and detailed architecture and stillness of the installation in the Woolworth Building, 7WTC definitely felt lighter, the music a touch more “Rhapsody in Blue” than Gregorian chants.

Some critics have mused that really all one needs is their own iPod with dramatic ecclesiastical music and a long walk along any New York street to achieve the same effects as these installations. And like the Gothic cathedral, which manipulates its visitors through emotional tricks, these installations perhaps do the same. But a secular cathedral is rare and valuable and it is indeed a shame that this project was temporary.

Yael Friedman writes about art and culture, and often about sports. She lives in Brooklyn and grew up in Tel Aviv and Rockaway (Bauhaus heaven and unapologetically homey beach town, respectively). You can check out more of her stuff at Ida Post.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

On August 6th, a small group gathered around artist Mary Mattingly to listen to “The Story of Flock House,” a history of her current work-in-progress and its corresponding exhibit, The Investigation, Constitution and Formation of Flock House, currently on view at the LMCC’s Art Center on Governors Island. Flock House is a prototype nomadic living system made of recycled materials that is designed to latch onto urban buildings and structures to establish symbiotic relationships with them and those who will reside in it.

Mattingly presented her talk in the LMCC gallery, an intimate setting that allowed the event to progress as a conversation rather than a lecture. The gallery space holds a compilation of bits and pieces of the elements that have both generated and been generated by the Flock House project – from diagrams and sketches to sculptures and photographs. Born in 2010, the House is the sequel to Mattingly’s Waterpod project, a floating mobile dwelling, also made of recycled materials, that aims to push the boundaries of the ever-densifying city into New York’s waterways. Flock House, much like the Waterpod, offers a malleable and fluctuating space that migrates around New York City, this time pushing the city into the limitless sky.

Flock House Installation at 33 Flatbush Avenue | via marymattingly.com

The first photograph of Mattingly’s presentation, a black and white print of a wooden house on wheels in Northern Connecticut in which she was raised, made clear the early origins of her fascination with nomadic living systems. But the concept of a perched, autonomous living system did not occur to Mattingly until she was navigating around the five boroughs during her Waterpod journey. Throughout these travels, she encountered a new fascination: industrial waterfront cranes and the operators’ cabs affixed to them. She began to imagine migratory houses with hanging gardens tethered to old structures, wondering “Is this the future of New York?” Mattingly and a few of her friends moved into one of these perched crane-top cabins and lived there until they were kicked out for legal reasons. Unimpeded, Mattingly established a relationship with Al Attara, a Brooklyn landlord with community-driven, eco-friendly visions, who gave her permission to use the rooftop of 33 Flatbush Avenue – a sanctuary of communal spaces for artists and entrepreneurs — as the birthplace for the House.

Flock House began to materialize. Mattingly and her collaborators gradually collected recycled materials (mostly abandoned vehicle parts and construction materials), planted vegetation and, with the help of architecture students, constructed a pathway of wooden planks. In summer 2010, a prototype of the House was installed at Smack Mellon Gallery to allow for greater public access to the work-in-progress.

Flock House Installation at Smack Mellon | via marymattingly.com

Though Flock House is constantly undergoing changes as a basic principle, certain components are set in stone. The fiberglass exterior shell is made of recycled industrial materials that have been crushed and re-casted into an organic sphere with open patches intended to mimic human migratory patterns around the globe. Its size is fixed to match the width of a highway lane for travelling purposes. This shell, however, wraps around a modular skeleton comprised of steel bars that can be hinged and unhinged into any desired shape. Eventually, the House will be able to latch onto other structures. Inhabitants will use collected rainwater to shower, drink and grow vegetation, and solar and human power to generate energy. (The team of architecture students collaborating with Mattingly is currently studying human power systems.)

The Governors Island exhibit presents a myriad of fantastical, non-functional, self-sufficient systems constituted of recycled materials: a vibration-powered light system; an air-purifier that sucks smog in and releases clean air, potable water, and fertilizer; a build-your-own-island system; a wearable home; and a bike-powered water purification system. Mattingly intentionally staged a conceptual show, presenting her interest in the fantastic and the plausible existence of such systems in the future, rather than their engineered actualization. But she also used charming subtleties, such as a rock under one of the wheels of bicycle system that would hypothetically hinder it from moving forward, to draw the viewer back to the real-world relevance of the systems she imagines. Infused throughout the installation is Mattingly’s criticism of the hasty pace of our times: “The more we speed up, the more we need to slow down.”

Air Ship Arecibo City | via robertmann.com

Perfection is by no means Mattingly’s ambition. She is not on a mission to reinvent living systems as perfectly autonomous utopic habitats. In fact, she was pleasantly surprised to encounter new obstacles from destination point to destination point during her travels in the Waterpod. Likewise, Flock House is meant to rely upon the symbiotic relationships that will emerge in each of its new environments. She references Archigram’s Plug-in City ­– a framework for an imaginary city with components that are plugged in and consistently reorganized – as inspiration. Through interdependent relationships, the project will encourage human collaboration and teamwork, a crucial element for the future of our cities.

Though Flock House’s journey has not yet been fully choreographed, a few of its destination points are nearly definite, including Times Square, Brooklyn Bridge Park and Snug Harbor, and it is scheduled to commence its travels with invited guests in May 2012. And though the House is a tangible project with a concrete plan of action, The Investigation, Constitution, and Formation of Flock House bears the form of a conceptual alternative to urban development. Flock House itself is simply a more elaborate manifestation of Mattingly’s dreamlike collages and of her endearingly clumsy “system” sculptures; a baby-step towards awareness.

The Investigation, Constitution and Formation of Flock House is on view through August 14.

Claire Ross is currently a project assistant at Urban Omnibus and will soon be obtaining her M.Arch at the City College of New York. She grew up in New York, Philadelphia and France’s Cote d’Azur and now lives in Manhattan.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

53rd Street on a weeknight evening is witness to a medley of pedestrians: midtown commuters bustling to the subway, visitors departing MoMA and tourists heading to ogle 5th Avenue storefronts. Most move briskly through the stretch between 5th and 6th Avenues because, let’s be honest, why linger? For the past month though, an unexpected display of colors, textures and medias have claimed the windows of the former Donnell Library and arrested the attention of passersby. “Pantheon: A History of Art from the Streets of NYC” chronicles a timeline of New York’s underground art and artists through an exhibition of their work, encapsulating street art’s multifarious forms as well as the progression of the movement with a rough-around-the-edges vibrancy that is a refreshing contrast to the neighborhood’s Seagram Building sleekness.

At the Donnell Library exhibition, curators have found a way to bring the “the art of trespassing” – as a stenciled piece by John Feckner states – into sanctioned public space. With the help of Chashama (a non-profit group that finds spaces for emerging artists to display their work by recycling vacant properties throughout the city), Pantheon creates alternative uses for unused spaces in time when real estate is being reevaluated. Not only does this tie into a trend of pop-up spaces, repurposed storefronts and communal gallery spaces, it sends a message about the potential for public institutions like libraries to assist emerging artists and foster creative activity in the city – and in an area not known for DIY aspirations to boot.

A sampling of graffiti, murals and sculpture, Pantheon creates a palette of the many styles, shades and artistic intentions that have been writ large on city streets in the past decade. Of course, displaying this work in such a manner removes it from the context of its surreptitious urban site, and limits the large scale many graffiti artists and muralists work in. But change of venue brings a new message — making visible the creative conversation between street artists and even allowing viewers to engage in that conversation themselves.

In the final window of Donnell Library, Jessie Bowers (a.k.a. Cypha) can be found working on his portion of the installation — a three-walled painting entitled “Muze” inspired by the influence of hip-hop and soul music in the city. People stop and watch Bowers working, sometimes snapping photos or talking to the artist when he ambles out on to the street. Marking the trajectory of street art, and including the artist at work in its end, communicates that the movement isn’t about sneaking around. It is about working with a community, and still, in an unexpected library window, about the element of surprise.

This is the final weekend of Pantheon: A History of Art from the Streets of NYC. The exhibition closes on Sunday, May 1.

All images courtesy of Caitlin Blanchfield.

Caitlin Blanchfield is a freelance writer residing in New York City.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Last Friday, Columbia University GSAPP’s Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture program, along with Domus, hosted Interpretations: Exhibition Practice. Interpretations was a one-day symposium to discuss critically how architecture is curated and exhibited. The focus was sometimes taken narrowly, such as explaining the logistics of mounting architecture exhibitions, and other times very broadly, such as considering conceptual problems of curating at large and curating architecture specifically. The symposium was organized by a group of first year CCCP students and consisted of a keynote lecture by Beatriz Colomina and panel discussions on three exhibition categories: contextual, survey and themed. The Contextual panel was presented by Kurt W. Forster with commentary by Ute Meta Bauer and Joseph Grima, with reference to the Ninth International Architecture Biennale in Venice, moderated by Mark Wigley. The Survey panel was presented by Barry Bergdoll with commentary by Keller Easterling and Damon Rich, with reference to Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, moderated by Felicity D. Scott. The Themed panel was presented by Mirko Zardini with commentary by Sarah Herda and Tobi Maier, with reference to Actions: What You Can Do With the City, moderated by Mark Wasiuta.

The format of the event was simple; a curator from a recent architectural exhibition would present lessons learned in hindsight and would restate the curatorial ambition of the given project. These presentations were followed by responses from two different curators and a discussion. Often the commentary was less of a response to the given show and more of a presentation of their own work, often closely relating, sometimes not so much. The more satisfying responses looked critically at, or expanded upon, the initial exhibition.

Beatriz Colomina, Keynote Speaker

Beatriz Colomina’s keynote speech focused largely on the Clip/Stamp/Fold exhibition, which was originally shown at Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2007 and has since traveled to the CCA in Montreal and the AA in London, and shown at Documenta XII. Led by Colomina and a group of Ph.D. students at Princeton, Clip/Stamp/Fold reexamined the culture of “little magazines” that proliferated in the 1960s and ’70s. While the description of the content and form of the shows was important, perhaps the most salient point of her talk was not its overview, but the fact that each time the exhibition traveled it took on a new life and evolved in both scale and content. Each opening was paired with a series of lectures and discussions from individuals who had originally created the magazines. Colomina claimed that those events reactivated the discussions of what it meant to produce literature that was trying to be radical, to propose new ideas and to work outside the system of mainstream architectural media. Each time the show opened in a new city, new magazines and radical publications were discovered, and often times they were included. In effect, the show itself became a vehicle for research.

Barry Bergdoll, Keller Easterling, Damon Rich and Felicity D. Scott

Barry Bergdoll presented the Museum of Modern Art’s Home Delivery (2008) for the Survey panel. Bergdoll offered some background on MoMA’s history of full-scale home installations in its garden, from the Breuer house in the House in the Museum Garden show of 1949 through Home Delivery, which featured five, full-scale prefabricated homes installed in a lot adjacent to MoMA. Bergdoll stressed the importance of the architectural method in rethinking the notion of prefabrication, framing his show much less as a survey than as a snapshot of current trends and technologies and how those relate to and are informed by past experiments. Keller Easterling responded at greater length about the past experiments with prefabrication at MoMA as well as some of her own research and the Some True Stories exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture. Damon Rich presented Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center, which he installed at the Queens Museum of Art in 2009. The discussion provided useful historical context and contrasted housing design in the setting of an institution like MoMA versus that of the Queens Museum, at which Rich’s Red Lines advanced a decidedly activist agenda, often involving workshops for local residents and easily digestible information graphics.

Mirko Zardini, Sarah Herda and Mark Wasiuta

The final and most successful panel, about “themed” exhibitions, was presented by Mirko Zardini and revolved around Actions: What You Can Do With the City, shown at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 2008 and later at the Graham Foundation in 2009. Sarah Herda, Director of the Graham Foundation, was responsible for the show’s installation there, and her perspective and experiences on the same show is what made this panel successful. The very nature of Actions — a collection of ideas, installations, interventions and acts of resistance — provided for an interesting discussion on the role of the institution and its process of collecting and showing work. Zardini described the problems of curating and collecting outside of gallery walls. There were moments during Actions when the CCA itself had constructed an apparatus to represent a project or recreated an intervention within the gallery space. This brought up issues of authorship, not just as it pertains to the practice of curating, but as it relates to the very real practice of collecting. Zardini described some of the internal discussions about whether or not CCA should enter certain works in Actions into its collection. The nature of this body of work and the fact that the CCA was, in certain cases, responsible for its creation, gave them pause. Yet, just by having shown the work in the exhibition, it had acquired value. From the audience, Anthony Vidler brought up the controversy surrounding the Situationist International show at the ICA Boston in 1989, a reference that encapsulates much of the discussion surrounding the methods, purpose and problems of curating. According to Vidler, the Situationists themselves rejected the idea that their work should, or even could, be collected and exhibited in a museum. They rejected the very institutionalization that a museum inevitably creates.

The ideas of institutionalization, authorship and the very media that architectural exhibits present and exist in were all ripe topics of discussion, as were economics, logistics and political environments. Most importantly, while these contexts provide ample fodder for critics, they also constitute the dynamics in which exhibitions are constructed. While many of these issues were not completely sorted out, they were re-proposed and, yes, interpreted.

Interpretations was billed as the first of many possible student-led symposiums to take place at GSAPP. While many of the discussions could have benefited from a bit more resistance and critical analysis, it is clear that the fields of architectural research, exhibition and dissemination need to be questioned. Let’s hope that over the next couple of years, more of these topics can be addressed in a venue that allows for these critical discussions to take place..

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Jordan Carver is a freelance writer and designer finishing up his Masters in Architecture and working on his Masters in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia University’s GSAPP. He is also a researcher for the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

The crowd at Moonlighter Presents | Photo: Brian Raby

Curating has become a ubiquitous cultural buzzword over the past couple years, ascribing thematic connections to just about anything that can be assembled. But Sunday night, when a crowd gathered at the Old School on Mott Street for the latest Moonlighter Presents installment, the evening took a refreshingly unthematic tone. A visual artist, an artist / urban planner, and an architect took to the podium to share thoughts on unrelated subjects of personal interest: hoodies (as in the sweatshirt), graphs and “unsolicited architecture.” Anthony Graves, Neil Freeman and Bjarke Ingles each spoke in a digestible 20 minute précis that whetted the audience’s appetite and invited listeners to form independent connections.

Anthony Graves | photo: Brian Raby

The disparity in topics gave presenters an equal footing on which to share the fruits of their research. Anthony Graves lead the audience through a history of the hoodie — that ever prevalent urban fashion typology popularized by hip-hop, American Apparel and Champion – as a symbol of disguise. Graves began with the hood’s inception in the church, where it warmed monks and conferred ecclesiastical power, and then moved through its use by the Klu Klux Klan, warehouse workers, women’s fashion and protest movements. Graves made clear that the significance of hoodie’s history goes beyond the object itself to comment on a form’s ability to adapt new meanings over its lifetime. As an urban phenomenon, the hood can claim a fascinating history as a means of concealing or cloaking the voice of dissent or rebellion in anonymity. And the process is reciprocal, just as the hoodie gives its wearer the ability to take on a voice or identity, a changing urban context mutates the meaning of the hood.

The Bridges of Konigsberg

Neil Freeman, whose art-as-urban-planning / urban-planning-as-art has appeared on Urban Omnibus in the past, introduced the audience to graph theory, a science that springs from an 18th century urban quandary well known in mathematics. In what was Konigsburg, Prussia (now known as Kaliningrad), a band of paraders wished to march the city without crossing any of its seven bridges more than once, a feat Leonard Euler proved impossible by employing a system of nodes and vertices, or what came to be known as graph theory. From there, Freeman moved on to look at a city with many more bridges — I’m sure we can all guess which — and then extrapolated nodes and edges to larger geographies. On a U.S. map he explained chromatic graph theory, a system of coloring areas enclosed by edges (like states) without the same color touching. Explicating graph theory through maps, a well known visual reference, Freeman made the math easier to comprehend and provided another frame to look at cities and geography– as graphs of movement and boundaries.

Bjarke Ingels | Photo: Brian Raby

Next up: a robust Dane with commanding stage presence. Bjarke Ingels was the evening’s headliner – the huge attention given to his firm’s recent plans for a Copenhagen power plant / ski slope and a West Side residential building was a likely reason for the room’s exceeded capacity. [click here to watch a podcast of Ingels' Architectural League lecture -ed.] Deploying the humorous spirit found in his designs, Ingels presented BIG’s less successful projects, calling it unsolicited architecture. Unsolicited architecture refers to work conceived independently of a competition or commission, work that challenges the tradition of architects being called upon to respond to problems instead of posing questions. For Bjarke Ingels, that just won’t stand. One proposal, which would create a new five-pointed super harbor island between Denmark and Germany, consolidating European shipping and the Danish urban population, was scored with the Star Wars theme song and scrolling text, “not so long ago, far far away a group of architects decided to use their collective creativity and competence. Not on small decorative details but big questions.” The big questions that BIG asks assume architecture and urbanism are inextricable. They integrate urban design and infrastructure into large-scale buildings that reframe public engagement with energy and with urban space.  Eco-architecture and green building have gained popularity lately, and the reality of a world fraught with climate change will only increase the urgency of building sustainably. Sustainable design seems split into two camps – those who want to meet standards and just get things built, and those with grand, if impractical, eco-topian visions that will never come to fruition. Bjarke Ingels is one of few architects to find the middle ground. What he presented Sunday night was well thought-out and responsive to its urban context, with sufficient silliness to actually be innovative and entertaining.

So, hoodies, coloring graphs and architecture that keeps it fresh, what is the connection? The beauty of the Moonlighter Presents series is that we are open to make our own. Sure, the brief segments don’t crescendo to a deeper understanding on a predetermined theme, but they do create a platform to explore an unexpected nugget of knowledge. Like the fabric of a city, the arbitrary proximity of distinct themes plays out differently for each person. Unpacking a sartorial trend, breaking down the theories behind graphic representation and building big, all inform an informal understanding of what makes a city.

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Caitlin Blanchfield is a freelance writer and Urban Omnibus project associate residing in New York City.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.