Archinect - News

Michael Kimmelman goes in search of Paul Rudolph’s true legacy at the Met

2024-10-17T18:17:00-04:00

He’s now the subject of a modest but riveting retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, organized by Abraham Thomas, called 'Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph,' whose first order of business is obviously to answer a question people outside architecture circles will ask, namely: Who was he?

The exhibition, the Met’s first major show on modern architecture in almost fifty years, opened on September 30th and includes over 80 artifacts from the Kentucky-born Rudolph’s five-decade career. The last day to see this is March 16th, 2025.

Kimmelman says it offers an interesting recount of how the "shining light of the Kennedy era" morphed into league with the originator of his failed Lower Manhattan Expressway plan, Robert Moses, bemoaning "his grand plans and recklessness, his truculence and tragic arc."

MoMA exhibition on 20th-century Latin American design is a 'gem' says Michael Kimmelman

2024-04-05T13:31:00-04:00

The show is a gem. It focuses on domestic design from six countries (Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Venezuela), produced between 1940 and 1980. Latin America had entered a period of transformation, industrial expansion and creativity. Across the region, design was becoming institutionalized as a profession, opening up new avenues, especially for women.

Critic Michael Kimmelman has heaped praise on the 'Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1940–1980' MoMA exhibition in a new piece for The New York Times. As we reported in December of last year, the show looks at the growth of modernism through an industrial and entrepreneurial lens, using a selection of examples from well-known and revered architects and designers such as Joaquim Tenreiro, Lina Bo Bardi, and Oscar Niemeyer.

"The role that women and immigrants played in shaping professional design and developing a national design vocabulary in Latin America will be emphasized, including the work of designers such as Clara Porset in Mexico, Cornelis Zitman in Venezuela, and Susi Aczel in Argentina," MoMA said about their exhibition at the time.

New Yorkers are still pissed about disrupted view sheds and 262 Fifth Avenue

2024-03-10T08:00:00-04:00

“It really pisses me off,” Clark said while standing in the plaza in front of the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue, a few blocks south of the dueling skyscrapers. “The whole New York skyline has been destroyed. When I moved here I was thrilled with it, and now it’s just getting disgusting. These new buildings have no identity, no design to them. We’ve lost the character of New York, and it breaks my heart.”

The Guardian goes inside some locals' struggle against the new 262 Fifth Avenue condo tower by Meganom and SLCE Architects. The East Siders protesting their obstructed view sheds are also not in favor of its appearance or the design for 432 Park Avenue, including several inspired teen critics on TikTok.

NYT critic Michael Kimmelman also wrote of their plight last year, declaring theirs and other opposition attempts a noble attempt at restoring the city’s history in an era defined by zoning manipulation and visible inequality.

A preservationist named Jorge Otero-Pailos told Kimmelman last October that new regulations are needed to “guarantee a collective experience, a sense of shared identity and civic meaning, which can bind New Yorkers across generations and centuries.”

Michael Kimmelman checks in on a case study for affordable housing in NYC

2024-02-13T17:49:00-05:00

It wasn’t a visual spectacle, but it was handsome and dignified, standing out with its prefab metal facade not just in a neighborhood of empty lots, aging apartment blocks and derelict rail tracks but also against a backdrop of dreary, bare-bones affordable housing developments all across the city. Most important, its goal was larger than itself: to reimagine subsidized housing for a new century. I promised in that column to report back on whether it succeeded. Did it?

The Via Verde redux is an interesting return to Kimmelman's very first Times column. He wrote the housing scheme’s developer Phipps “knows what it’s doing.”

Whatever is working has got to be scaled up and replicated rather quickly. As he points out, both the city and New York State failed to adequately fund and approve new housing starts to enter the construction pipeline in 2023 despite a present need for approximately 50,000 new units annually.

Kimmelman, whose personal mission to raise housing standards for New Yorkers is well known, is occasionally charged with promotionalism for writing such pieces. (It's worth noting that this is now the critic's second review of a completed Dattner project in as many years.)

Michael Kimmelman again asks: 'Should New York regulate its skyline?'

2023-10-25T15:11:00-04:00

A generation ago, the New York skyline was a global icon, shaped more or less like a suspension bridge stretched between the Empire State and the Twin Towers, making it possible to, say, pop out of some unfamiliar subway station, gaze up toward the clouds and orient oneself along the skyline’s north-south axis. Today, the skyline is vastly more complex, far-flung and difficult to picture, and it’s common to hear complaints that the city has lost its bearings.

The addition of Meganom and SLCE’s 860-foot 262 Fifth Avenue tower to New York’s accidental skyline also raises questions about legislating ‘view sheds’ and historic sightlines around the city, Michael Kimmelman writes. The city currently only has one protected vista overlooking the Financial District from Brooklyn Heights. Developers have famously been manipulating the local zoning code governing allowable height in order to receive approvals, an issue Kimmelman has preached about in earnest for the past decade.

“It’s time to rethink our assumptions,” preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos tells him, before adding his opinion that regulations would “guarantee a collective experience, a sense of shared identity and civic meaning, which can bind New Yorkers across generations and centuries.”

Construction of 262 Fifth Avenue is expected to wrap up by the end of 2024.

Michael Kimmelman looks for signs of hope in Penn Station’s proposed renewal

2023-07-07T13:17:00-04:00

The only thing everyone seems to know for certain is that nothing meaningful ever really happens to improve North America’s busiest and most miserable train hub, despite decades of demands and promises. Hope has long gone to die on the 6:50 to Secaucus. But now may actually be different.

Kimmelman complimented the new PAU/HOK/ASTM North America P3 plan as “the disruption needed to get Albany moving", and one that “lets daylight, dignity and circulatory logic replace the rat’s maze beneath Madison Square Garden.”

“ASTM’s architecture at this early stage is a little stiff and self-serious but it clearly conveys the all-important point that a gateway worthy of New York, and of the millions of working people who rely on it, needs to offer more than high ceilings, clear signage and hot bagels. It needs to be a source of public pride," he added.

Juxtaposed to this is the more bland but Albany-backed MTA plan (with drawings from FXCollaborative) whose full details won’t be unveiled until next year. The West Side native says the scheme presents a vexing problem over the involvement of Madison Square Garden, which he predicts would lead to crippling lawsuits if the MTA's adversarial position remains unchanged.

The NY Times' Michael Kimmelman reviews Adjaye Associates' Bronx 'DREAM'

2023-02-20T12:31:00-05:00

In this case, architecture is the issue and the engine of renewal. With its triple-height library and exalting, barrel-vaulted classrooms with huge punched windows overlooking Manhattan, the redesigned ice plant becomes one of the most spectacular school buildings in the city. [...] the historical arc of 20 Bruckner, as the building is called, is instructive and tells a larger tale about the Bronx, change and renewal.

The NY Times critic gets off the sixth train to explore Adjaye Associates' first American K-12 project in Mott Haven, The Bronx. Kimmelman mentioned his two best-known New York projects – 130 William Street and Sugar Hill Mixed-Use Development – in addition to D.C’s National Museum of African American History and Culture for context and said its well-placed lightwells and other design features place a “premium on architecture [that] makes an obvious statement about the value of Dream’s students.”

He went on to add what seems like a heartfelt note on the tragic deaths of three immigrant construction workers on the site between 2019 and 2021. “I didn’t begin this column with that information because Assemblywoman Septimo is right," he wrote. "Stories about the South Bronx invariably start with trauma, casting the community as victim. For students, the new DREAM school is a place of hope and opportunity — a new chapter and good news for the neighborhood.”

It seems like a critic trying...

Michael Kimmelman on some newer rays of light in NYC’s public housing stock

2022-02-07T11:59:00-05:00

Writing about Twin Parks in 1973, The Times’s former architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, speculated that the project might “turn out to be important in the history of housing design.” [...] design, however compassionate, can mean only so much against the obstacles that make up the housing problem today.” The calculus is the same half a century later. But the South Bronx isn’t. Gradually, it has been remade. Progress isn’t impossible, it’s a process.

Both observed South Bronx developments, 1490 Southern Boulevard and a transformation of the Lambert Houses, are seen as examples of high-quality and effective public housing that offers residents more than just desultory amenities. The Times critic broke down the new-ish developments by Dattner and Bernheimer Architects by first cautioning us with a history lesson about nearby Twin Parks (which Paul Goldberger predicted might “turn out to be important in the history of housing design” at its opening in 1973), adding that, in his view, the pair offer “templates for redoing” many of NYCHA’s 302 other campuses.

“It’s an 18-story building with 163 permanently affordable units and a doorman. The boxy, drab exterior, set a few steps up and back from the street wall, looks almost belligerently banal. But inside the building is comfortable, luxurious even, compared with the deteriorating apartments and hallways I saw in the old buildings. Crucial to the conversion, no tenants are being dis...

'Architecture as a vehicle for liberation and joy:' Michael Kimmelman in conversation with the Black Reconstruction Collective

2021-03-11T19:02:00-05:00

What’s below is a conversation with members of the Black Reconstruction Collective, which came together during the past year and a half, in tandem with an exhibition now at the Museum of Modern Art called “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America.” The collective’s members are the 10 architects, artists and designers in the exhibition.

NYT architecture critic Michael Kimmelman has published a condensed version of his conversation with Amanda Williams, Emanuel Admassu, J. Yolande Daniels, and V. Mitch McEwen — four of the ten architects, designers, and artists of the Black Reconstruction Collective whose work is currently featured in the MoMA exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America.

Related on Archinect:

Michael Kimmelman on the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act

2020-07-20T13:58:00-04:00

Thirty years on, the A.D.A. has reshaped American architecture and the way designers and the public have come to think about civil rights and the built world. We take for granted the ubiquity of entry ramps, Braille signage, push buttons at front doors, lever handles in lieu of doorknobs, widened public toilets, and warning tiles on street corners and subway platforms. [...] The A.D.A. has baked a more egalitarian aesthetic of forms and spaces into the civic DNA.

Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times highlights how public discourse surrounding designing for people with disabilities has changed in the three decades that have passed since the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Highlighting the tensions that exist between terms like "universal" and "inclusive" design, Kimmelman also revisits a recent glowing review he wrote last year of the Steven Holl Architects-designed Hunters Point Library in Queens, the design of which was highlighted by members of the community as being rather inaccessible in terms of its design.

Michael Kimmelman lobbies AIA to bar architects from working on solitary confinement facilities

2020-06-15T13:01:00-04:00

But death chambers and many solitary confinement cells — they’re officially called segregation units, not incidentally — are extreme cases. Architects should not contribute their expertise to the most egregious aspects of a system that commits exceptional violence against African-Americans and other minorities. The least the American Institute of Architects can do now is agree.

The New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman has penned a column highlighting the moral implications of having architects design solitary confinement and execution facilities. In the article, Kimmelman explores the American Institute of Architect's reluctance to take a positive stand against having architects design these facilities.

Michael Kimmelman explores New York City's iconic skyscrapers on virtual walks with Guy Nordenson and Annabelle Selldorf

2020-04-29T15:06:00-04:00

Over the years, architects have not been the only ones to inscribe New York’s skyline — the signature image of the last American century — across the urban ether. Among others, structural engineers, practical poets of often towering imagination and import, have also figured out how to scale those heights. Skyscrapers are team efforts, after all.

For his latest feature in a series of virtual strolls exploring iconic Manhattan skyscrapers with noteworthy building experts, NYT architecture critic Michael Kimmelman invited engineer Guy Nordenson to join him for a closer look at the midcentury, Eero Saarinen-designed Black Rock/CBS Building, the Postmodernist classic 550 Madison Avenue, formerly known as AT&T Building, and 432 Park Avenue by Rafael Viñoly.

If you missed last week's virtual walk around town, catch up with Kimmelman and architect Annabelle Selldorf inspecting Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson's Seagram Building, the MetLife Building (formerly Pan Am Building), 270 Park Avenue (originally known as Union Carbide building and currently being demolished by JPMorgan Chase), the Lever House, and 601 Lexington Avenue (once known as Citicorp Center) designed by Hugh Stubbins.

Looking for a curated selection of the best virt...

David Rockwell on his favorite historic NYC Broadway theaters

2020-03-31T00:45:00-04:00

I find it interesting that theaters are so resilient. They can have many lives. [...] For architects, set design can be a lesson in the fact that nothing is permanent. Permanence can be a little restricting, it turns out. Theater isn’t permanent. It exists when there is an audience.

Michael Kimmelman shares an interview with architect David Rockwell, who talked about some of his favorite historic Broadway theaters in NYC while the two went on a walk recently. Rockwell talks about the influence that theater had for him as a child, a few theater design projects his firm worked on, and not to mention some valuable, heartfelt lessons that the world of musical theater can teach during these uncertain times.

Michael Kimmelman on appreciating urban life during a pandemic

2020-03-17T16:58:00-04:00

Pandemics [...] are anti-urban. They exploit our impulse to congregate. And our response so far — social distancing — not only runs up against our fundamental desires to interact, but also against the way we have built our cities and plazas, subways and skyscrapers. They are all designed to be occupied and animated collectively. For many urban systems to work properly, density is the goal, not the enemy.

Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times, waxes wistfully over the inherent collectivity of urban life as the COVID-19 pandemic shuts down cities around the globe.

Describing the current state of affairs, Kimmelman writes, “Today’s threat is altogether another sort of challenge to solidarity and our way of life. It is not a heat wave or a blitz. It can’t be mitigated by going to concerts or museums. It requires isolation. We will need to figure out a different approach, together.”

Michael Kimmelman on the future of jails in NYC

2019-12-19T19:29:00-05:00

Will New York’s new jails be places where visiting families feel welcome? Will the jails provide space for police officers and medical staff to train together? For detainees to confer with lawyers? For therapeutic assistance and recreation? Outside as well as inside, will they be scaled to their surroundings, will the city be open to other sites and will the buildings architecturally represent, as borough landmarks, our civic ideals and values?

Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times, provides an spirited overview of the ongoing developments in New York City regarding the planned decommissioning and relocation of the prison facilities located on Rikers Island. The large-scale infrastructure and architecture practice AECOM was recently selected to design four high-rise replacement facilities that are to be located one per borough (except on Staten Island).

Attempting to place architects at the center of the debate, Kimmelman writes, "If we’re going to keep building jails, can new architecture help heal what ails the penal system? Jails are works of architecture, after all."

Planned cable-car network over Jerusalem divides the public

2019-09-16T19:51:00-04:00

Israeli authorities have approved a plan to build a cable car to the Western Wall, one of the holiest sites in the Jewish world, by 2021. It’s the first phase of what proponents envision as a fleet of cable cars crisscrossing the locus of sacred sites known as the Holy Basin.

NYT architecture critic Michael Kimmelman explains the controversial plan for a cable-car network, envisioned to connect significant Jewish religious sites in Jerusalem while bypassing Palestinian neighborhoods, and how the concept contributes to a "Disneyfication" of the Holy City as much as Israel's "architecture of occupation."

"Trumpeted by right-wing Israeli leaders as a green solution to the challenges of increased tourism and traffic in and around the Old City," Kimmelman writes, "the plan has provoked howls of protest from horrified Israeli preservationists, environmentalists, planners, architects and others who picture an ancient global heritage site turned into a Jewish-themed Epcot, with thousands of passengers an hour crammed into huge gondolas lofting across the sky."

Israeli-born Canadian architect Moshe Safdie is among the vocal opponents of the cable car.

Michael Kimmelman reflects on NYC's old Penn Station: 'The gateway it deserved'

2019-04-29T14:49:00-04:00

Conceived to handle fewer than 200,000 passengers, the replacement Penn Station is today the busiest transit hub in the Western Hemisphere, through which more than 600,000 commuters pass each day — an experience as humiliating and bewildering as Grand Central remains inspiring and exalted.

NYT architecture critic Michael Kimmelman takes a look back at the triumphal arrival of the former Pennsylvania Station by McKim, Mead & White in 1910, its steady decline in the following decades, the consequential replacement with the current solution—a disappointing product of mid-century modernist pragmatism—followed by a call for a better gateway.

Aerial view of the former Pennsylvania Station shortly after it opened in 1910.

"When Penn Station became during the mid-1960s a subterranean rat’s maze, the city seemed to be heading very definitely south," Kimmelman writes. "The historic preservation movement, which rose from the vandalized station’s ashes, was born of a new pessimism."

Reflecting Prada's philosophical roots in Arte Povera, plus other ghosts of midcentury modernism

2018-08-25T14:13:00-04:00

I kept running my hands over the tower’s concrete walls. Infused with Carrara marble and poured by construction workers who wore white gloves, they feel smooth as silk. The big rectangular and wedge-shaped galleries, windows alternating between panoramas of the city and narrow views over the campus, accommodate best the large-scale works in the inaugural show

Earlier this year, Michael Kimmelman traveled to Milan, for the completion of 'Torre', cornerstone of Fondazione Prada's new campus, by OMA.

Back in April, davvid shared his own review "It's very nice. The whole...complex is beautiful."

65,000 new streetlights illuminate Detroit—here's why that's important

2017-01-11T18:29:00-05:00

Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times has published an article about the 65,000 new streetlights now illuminating the streets of Detroit. This seemingly prosaic infrastructural adjustment actually has a lot of import. For a long time, according to the article, Detroit’s decline was symbolically represented in articles about its lights going out. “Like picking up the trash, fixing potholes and responding to emergencies, these efforts signal that no matter where you live in Detroit, you are no longer forgotten — that government here can finally keep its basic promises,” writes Kimmelman.

Rather than staying concentrated in the inner-city, like most capital and growth, the lights spread across Detroit’s entire 139 miles. Costing $185 million in public money, the lights use energy-efficient LED bulbs. And the whole project came together under budget and on time.

Michael Kimmelman presents his 2016 'Best Architecture in New York' list

2016-12-16T13:27:00-05:00

In ways big and small, architects like Mr. Berman have changed New York City this year. Projects like the library branch made it a little more livable and humane. What follows is nothing nearly as disciplined or logical as a list of 2016’s architectural highs and lows in town. It’s more a kind of belated thank you note for a few projects that kept faith with architecture’s ideals and the city’s better self.

Kimmelman's NYC-best-of-16 roundup includes DS+R/Gensler's Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center, Via 57 West by Bjarke Ingels & team, and the Renzo Piano-designed Jerome L. Greene Science Center, among others.

In the mood for more year-end reflections? Don't miss our ongoing series Archinect 2016 Year in Review.

Race for the Prize – Aravena's Pritzker ceremony, the scourge of unpaid internships and more on Archinect Sessions #59

2016-04-07T17:17:00-04:00

Last week we witnessed the loss of Dame Zaha Hadid, one of architecture's most formidable and prolific talents. We'll be devoting a later podcast episode to remembering her and honoring her work. Until then, we'll continue catching you up with the most significant architecture news from the past week.

This episode we discuss Alejandro Aravena's Pritzker acceptance speech (and the designs he's giving away for free), how NASA is experimenting with inflatable space houses, how we "crave" public space, and Nicholas Korody joins us to discuss the cockroach of unpaid architecture internships (they just won't die).

Listen to episode 59 of Archinect Sessions, "Race for the Prize":

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Michael Kimmelman on Public Squares

2016-04-01T14:40:00-04:00

Squares have defined urban living since the dawn of democracy, from which they are inseparable. [...] I don’t think it’s coincidental that early in 2011 the Egyptian revolution centered around Tahrir Square, or that the Occupy Movement later that same year, partly inspired by the Arab Spring, expressed itself by taking over squares like Taksim in Istanbul, the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona, and Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan.

The Art of Architecture Criticism: Archinect Sessions One-to-One #7 with Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for the New York Times

2016-01-18T17:27:00-05:00

Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for the New York Times, joins me for our first One-to-One interview of 2016. I wanted to talk with Kimmelman specifically about a piece he had published just at the end of last year, called “Dear Architects: Sound Matters”. The piece considers how an architectural space’s unique audio atmosphere helps create its overall personality, invariably affecting us as we experience it. Alongside Kimmelman’s writing in the piece are looped videos of different spaces – an office at the New York Times, a restaurant, the High Line, Penn Station, a penthouse – meant to be viewed while wearing headphones, to get to know that space’s sonic portrait, of sorts.

Too often, says Kimmelman, architects don’t think of sound as a material like they would concrete, glass or wood, when it can have a profound effect on the design’s overall impact. In our interview, Kimmelman shares how the piece came to be, and how it fits into the Times’ overall push into more multimedia...

Take a listen to the NYT's beautiful sonic portraits of architectural spaces

2015-12-29T17:45:00-05:00

we rarely talk about how architecture sounds, aside from when a building or room is noisy. [...] Sound may be invisible or only unconsciously perceived, but that doesn’t make it any less an architectural material than wood, glass, concrete, stone or light. [...] Acoustics can act in deep, visceral ways, not unlike music ... And while it’s sometimes hard to pin down exactly how, there is often a correlation between the function of a place or an object and the sound we expect it to make.

Architecture critic Michael Kimmelman and producers Alicia DeSantis, Jon Huang and Graham Roberts document the sounds of some archetypal city spaces, conveying the personality and subtle (or sometimes not) musicality of interiors.

Michael Kimmelman in praise of NYC's new garage-and-salt-shed complex: "Best examples of new public architecture in the city"

2015-12-22T14:14:00-05:00

After years of noisy protests, the New York City Department of Sanitation’s new garage-and-salt-shed complex has opened in Hudson Square, on the northern edge of TriBeCa. [...] The garage and shed have ended up being not just two of the best examples of new public architecture in the city but a boon to the neighborhood, whether the wealthy neighbors have come around to it or not. I can’t think of a better public sculpture to land in New York than the shed.

"[Architects] are not the creators of the city, but the midwives" says Bjarke Ingels

2015-07-23T13:51:00-04:00

In a fifty-one minute conversation with New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman, Bjarke Ingels does little to dispel his reputation as a media-friendly starchitect who dances his way around thorny design issues by reminding everyone of the rose. When Kimmelman brings up the wind issues that an 80th story outdoor space (such as the ones proposed for Two World Trade Center) is likely to encounter, Ingels relates an anecdote about how in Denmark the only car to have is a convertible, because even if the pleasant days are rare, they must be savored fully.

However, it is Ingels' redefinition of the architect's role, especially in the context of the discussion about how to shape the future cultural vibe of Manhattan, that makes Kimmelman shift in his seat:

Ingels: [Architects] are not the creators of the city, but the midwives.

Kimmelman: You make the architect sound a little more passive or receptive than maybe I'm comfortable with. Do you think the architect is just receiving other peopl...

Michael Kimmelman on why Paul Rudolph's brutalist Orange County building is worth saving

2015-03-04T13:47:00-05:00

Michael Kimmelman’s column this week, about the debate over plans to demolish a midcentury Paul Rudolph building in Goshen, N.Y., makes the case for why it should be saved. It is only one example of his taking up a cause. As The Times’s architecture critic, he has not been shy about advocacy. Here, he describes why he’s been outspoken in supporting this building, which doesn’t have the profile of other fights he has taken up.

UPDATE: Orange County legislators fail to save Paul Rudolph's Government Center

Previously:

Editor's Picks #400

2015-01-06T11:52:00-05:00

For the latest Student Works: Amelia featured Cellular Tessellation, a pavilion done as a "collaborative research effort among students from Bond University, University of Technology Sydney, University of South Wales, and University of Sydney" for the Sydney Vivid Light festival of 2014.

Plus, Alexander Showcase:(ed) architect Jorge Mealha’s Óbidos Technological Park Main Building, sited in the countryside north of Lisbon.

News

Paul scoured the archives and website analytics in an attempt to most accurately represent 2014, month by month, by sharing the most popular stories, job opportunities and discussions. Reflecting on digital publishing trends he noted

"As the internet continues to move discussions away from publications to social networks, Archinect's increase in volume in the forum and comments sections proves that we're continuing to provide a platform to facilitate communication across diverse social circles".

Meanwhile, Nicholas Korody put together a list of what Randy Deutsc...

Michael Kimmelman Reviews 1 World Trade Center

2014-11-30T13:14:00-05:00

“It’s not so bad,” offered an architect who has a window facing the building. Alas, it is. Like the corporate campus and plaza it shares, 1 World Trade speaks volumes about political opportunism, outmoded thinking and upside-down urban priorities. It’s what happens when a commercial developer is pretty much handed the keys to the castle.

Give and Take: Michael Kimmelman and Annabelle Selldorf discuss architectural ethics in urban environments

2014-10-20T13:58:00-04:00

The power of architecture at work in the modern city was a theme that emerged from the start at last Thursday night’s Big Ideas, Bold Thinkers, Brilliant Dialogue series at Pratt Institute. This particular conversation featured New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman and Architect Annabelle Selldorf. Moderator Spencer Bailey of Surface magazine used the broad term of “power of architecture” as a catalyst that spawned a conversation on the social responsibility of architecture as we move into an ever‐growing, thickening urban environment.

Selldof’s recent Sunset Park Recycling Center Brooklyn got the discussion going. Selldorf began by explaining why she was so excited to take on an infrastructure project, noting the architectural demands of the site and program were very interesting problems to take on. But the thing that most fascinated her about the project was its capacity to give back to the city by providing an important logistical hub to New York City as well as co...