nyc
(25 posts)
THE GREENEST HOME BOOK PARTY!
Wednesday, June 5
Panel Discussion, 6–7 pm
in Kellen Auditorium
Laura Briggs, Jared Della Valle, Karin Klingenberg, Tim McDonald, and David White; moderated by Julie Torres Moskovitz
Signing and reception, 7–8 pm
in the lobby
Sheila Johnson Design Center
Parsons New School for Design
2 West 13th Street, New York
Julie Torres Moskovitz is the founding principal of the collaborative design firm Fabrica 718 in Brooklyn. She retrofitted New York City’s first certified Passive House in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Thursday, May 23, 5:30 – 7:15 pm
Rizzoli Bookstore
31 West 57th Street, New York City
Just in time for summer, Francesca Cigola introduces us to the best sculpture parks across the United States. Join us for a book signing and celebration!
Francesca Cigola is an Italian architect and writer based in New York City.
Theater of Architecture Discussion
Hugh Hardy, Jim Houghton, Charles Renfro, Michael Sorkin
Introduced by Joe Melillo
A discussion on the occasion of the publication of Hugh Hardy’s book Theater of Architecture, which uses a variety of his projects to explore his thesis that the profession of architecture’s “true strength lies in the building of communities… by enhancing experience.” This panel will use the experiential aspects of theater design as a starting point for a discussion of architecture in the broadest sense, particularly the use of public space.
Hugh Hardy is the founder of H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture.
Jim Houghton is the founding artistic director of Signature Theatre Company in New York.
Charles Renfro is a principal of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
Michael Sorkin is a critic, author, and founder of Michael Sorkin Studio. Sorkin is also the Director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College of New York.
Joe Melillo is the executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Thursday, May 16, at 7:00 pm
BAM Fisher Hillman Studio
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
Tickets available here.
(pictured: Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture; photo: Durston Saylor)
From Theater of Architecture by Hugh Hardy, available from PAPress here.
Hugh Hardy is the quintessential New York architect. During his long and illustrious career, his contributions to some of the city’s most iconic and beloved cultural institutions have been indelible: Radio City Music Hall, Bryant Park, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the New Amsterdam and New Victory Theaters on 42nd Street, and the New York Botanical Garden. It would be difficult to pin him to a particular style or mode of designing. His approach is to derive the best solution possible from each project’s context and client’s needs. For example, at Radio City Music Hall, he restored the building to its original art deco elegance; but at the Harvey Theater at BAM, his restoration retains both new and old elements layered together in the same space.
Although Hugh Hardy is best known for the work he’s done in NYC, he has an impressive portfolio of projects from across the country. Hugh applied his knowledge of theatrical acoustics and sightlines to the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Jackson, MS, where he worked with the chief judge to design courtrooms that make it as easy as possible for the judge and jury to clearly hear every testimony and see each piece of evidence, which traditionally has been eclipsed by other concerns. The Botanical Research Institute of Texas showcases his innovation in landscape design, energy and water management, and materials.
Theater of Architecture features interviews with Hugh’s clients and collaborators, conducted by Mildred Friedman, which demonstrate his commitment to a shared practice. Hugh’s daughter, Penny Hardy, along with Carren Edward Petrosyan, of the graphic design firm PS New York, designed the book.
Sara Stemen, Senior Editor here at Princeton Architectural Press, was the project editor on Theater of Architecture and says that Hugh is “incredibly enthusiastic. He’s mad about the process of architecture, of theater, of language. The meticulous attention Hardy gives to his work and his writing are inspiring; it has been an honor to work with him. His body of work is impressive, and a gift to New York City and beyond.”
Rafael Guastavino and his talented family are finally getting the attention they deserve. NPR just posted an excellent story about the remarkable built legacy of the Guastavino clan on the occasion of the opening of the National Building Museum’s new exhibition Palaces for the People: Guastavino and America’s Great Public Spaces. It’s curated by MIT professor John Ochsendorf, the author of our epic monograph Guastavino Vaulting. John sums it up nicely in a video on the National Building Museum website: “In whatever city you’re in you can almost certainly find a significant building with Gustavino vaulting.” May we suggest you start with a late-afternoon lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal? Celebrate the100th anniversary of that classic publishing and Mad Men haunt with Oysters Rockefeller and an Old Fashioned!
Guastavino Vaulting | Lecture & Exhibition
Lecture with author John Ochsendorf
Thursday, April 25, 2013 at 6:30 PM
New York Public Library Mid-Manhattan Library
455 Fifth Avenue
Palaces for the People: Guastavino and America’s Great Public Spaces
Exhibition through January 20, 2014
National Building Museum
401 F Street NW, Washington, D.C
For the just released Theater of Architecture, Hugh Hardy reflects on his design philosophy and how it has informed high profile projects from the restoration of Radio City Music Hall and the BAM Harvey Theater to the addition of The Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center.
The trailer was created by James Willeford of H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture. Four brief excerpts spotlighting individual projects can be found on our Vimeo site.
On his French identity card, legendary architect Le Corbusier listed his profession as “Homme de Lettres” (Man of Letters). Celebrated for his architecture, which numbers fewer than sixty buildings, Le Corbusier also wrote more than fifty books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of letters.
Le Corbusier, Homme de Lettres is the first in-depth study of Le Corbusier as a writer as well as an architect. Featuring more than two hundred archival images from Le Corbusier’s life and work, this groundbreaking book examines his many writing projects from 1907 to 1947, as well as his letters written to two mentors: Charles L’Eplattenier and William Ritter. In Le Corbusier, Homme de Lettres author M. Christine Boyer focuses on the development of his writing style as it morphed from romantic prose to aphorisms and telegraphic bulletins.
For each of his books, Le Corbusier was meticulous about the design of the page layout, the form of the type, the impact of the ideas, and even the promotional material. As a man of letters, Le Corbusier expected to contribute to the cultural atmosphere of the twentieth century. Le Corbusier, Homme de Lettres shows for the first time how his voluminous output books, diaries, letters, sketchbooks, travel notebooks, lecture transcriptions, exposition catalogs, journal articles reflects not just a compulsion to write, but a passion for advancing his ideas about the relationship between architecture, urbanism, and society in a new machine age.
Le Corbusier: The Writings of an Architect
Lecture by M. Christine Boyer
Thursday, February 21, 7:30pm
La Maison Française, NYU
16 Washington Mews (at University Place)
USPS Love stamp by Louise Fili
Put these on your Valentines (and send one to 37 East 7th Street NYC).
Ten of our Kindle editions are available for just $3.99 until December 22:
On Vision and Colors / Color Sphere
Writing About Architecture
Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities
Fabricating Architecture
Selected Readings in Digital Design and Manufacturing
Volume
Writings on Graphic Design, Music, Art, and Culture
Ethics for Architects
50 Dilemmas of Professional Practice
Five Flights Up
and Other New York Apartment Stories
The Suburbanization of New York
Is the World’s Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town?
Be sure to check out our full list of digital books at papress.com
Please excuse the interruption while we dry off. (#sandy)
Author John Comazzi will discuss the life and career of Balthazar Korab, the subject of his recent book Balthazar Korab: Architect of Photography.
The lecture will be illustrated by images from Korab’s portfolio of commissioned architectural photographs. Works featured will include Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York; the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana; Mies van der Rohe’s S. R. Crown Hall; Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University; Louis Kahn’s Kimball Art Museum; and Salk Institute among many others.
For this installment of Five Things, we asked Christopher Bonanos, author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid, to share with us what’s on his mind lately.
1. The Panorama of New York City
The Panorama is a scale model of New York’s five boroughs—with every single building represented individually, complete with painted windows—at the Queens Museum of Art. It was built for the 1964–65 World’s Fair, and, all at once, it’s a legitimate urban-planning tool, a giant and loopy piece of mid-century kitsch, and a completely compelling art installation. My colleague Jerry Saltz once called it the greatest artwork ever made about the insane city where he and I live, and I completely agree with him. I try to get there every year or so, to commune with this crazy thing, and I’m overdue for another visit. Most touching detail: because it was last updated in the 1990s, the Twin Towers remain in place. The curators have draped them, to mark the loss.
2. Little Wonder: The Reader’s Digest and How It Grew,
by John Bainbridge
Bainbridge was a first-class New Yorker writer of long reported stories, and he’s half-forgotten today. He shouldn’t be: his book-length profile of Texas, “The Super-Americans,” is a remarkable piece of immersion journalism, and this little book from 1946 is even better: a snappy, occasionally snide, incredibly funny profile of DeWitt Wallace and the utterly square, utterly American magazine he had built into a multinational empire. I’d be happy to ever write anything as good as this little book.
3. Edward Burtynsky
I am a sucker for industrial photographs of all kinds—Charles Sheeler, the Bechers, Lewis Hine—and I can’t get enough of Burtynsky’s. He takes landscapes that have been (depending on your viewpoint) either destroyed or completely reimagined by technological change, and renders them in ways that are both abstractly beautiful and concretely terrifying. If I had to choose, I’d say his photographs of mining from a few years ago are my favorites, especially those rivers that run tangerine or bottle green, and seem to come from not our own activity but some deep, deep underworld.
4. How It’s Made
From a formal standpoint, this Canadian series (carried in the U.S. by the Science Channel) is the worst show on television. It’s stocked with bad punny narration, atrocious canned music, and a weird indirect scriptwriting style that constantly refers to a mysterious, unexplained “they.” Yet this little series of mini-documentaries—which simply amounts to three factory tours per episode, showing us how “they” make cellos, or fiberglass kayaks, or haggis—is weirdly watchable, maybe because seeing familiar stuff come out of assembly lines in neat little rows, flowing into crates and trucks, is just ridiculously soothing. When I can’t sleep, the worst show on television is also the best.
5. Make It Bigger
A shout-out here to a fellow Princeton Architectural Press author, Paula Scher, with whom I did an onstage Q&A the other day. To prepare, I logged some serious time with her not-quite-a-memoir-not-quite-a-design-textbook, which PAPress published in 2006. I loved it, not just for its insights into the way people respond to type design but also for its canny view of the business of design: Scher’s war stories of dumb bosses, tiresome clients, and navigating pecking orders are useful in many fields besides hers.
Last weekend at the Printed Matter NY Art Book Fair, our friends (and authors) of The Electric Information Age book and album assembled in performance mode as The Masses (DJ/composer Daniel Perlin, designer/musician Adam Michaels, and historian/performer Jeffrey Schnapp, with live keyboards by Shannon Harvey).
The set was tight, rhythmic, and diverse, syncing up nicely with their inspirations—experimental paperbacks from the late 1960s and early 1970s which aimed to bring the ideas of contemporary thinkers like Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller to the masses. These small books were spliced and collaged into a pulsating video which was projected behind the band.
Additionally, Inventory Books introduced a very cool tote bag with some custom pockets for the book and LP.
