IfUD gets American Pavilion for 2012 Venice Biennale
BMW Guggenheim Lab during IfUD's Urban Design Week. (Tom Stoelker / AN)
We can confirm—although not entirely officially—that New York’s Institute for Urban Design will represent the United States at the 2012 Venice architecture biennale.
The Chair of Institutes Board of Directors Michael Sorkin has told AN that the theme of their exhibition will be loosely based on the Institute’s new open-source program, By the City/For The City: An Atlas of Possibility for the Future New York, that played out recently across New York to enthusiastic crowds. The details of the exhibition are still to be developed by Sorkin, co-board member Cathy Lang Ho and the institute’s director (and former AN Managing Editor) Anne Guiney.
The U.S. Department of State, in a first for the government agency, selected the winning exhibition a full year before the opening of the international exhibition giving the IfUD team time to raise the $300,000 (the State Department has given them $100,000) needed to open in Venice next year.
It is not yet clear who will be the official commissioner aka “meeter, greeter, & spokesperson” of the pavilion, but they are currently looking to create “crowd sourced” events all over la Serenissima and not just inside the official giardini or McKim Mead & White American temple. We send our hearty congratulations and will start hoarding our airline miles!
An Urban Design Week Round-Up
An outline of Urban Tactics from the City Sessions debate. (Molly Heintz)
Following Thursday evening’s Urban Design Week (UDW) launch party hosted by the Institute for Urban Design (IfUD) at the breezy BMW Guggenheim Lab, the AN team dispersed to check out various events on the jam-packed UDW roster. We compiled our notes, and here’s a quick sampling of what we saw and heard:
Saturday, September 17: A small contingent of planners, landscape architects, and artists met up at Montefiore Park, a tiny triangle of a plaza at 137th Street where Broadway slices through Manhattan’s orderly grid. The group was invited to offer feedback on an installation at the site entitled Broadway: 1000 Steps. The interactive piece by Mary Miss (and CaLL) is an experiment in educating the public on environmental issues through artwork. A collection of periscope-like tubes and mirrors confront passersby with stats on sustainability initiatives in the city. Keep your eyes peeled—the piece will work its way down Broadway over the course of the next few months.
Building Hope for Haiti
(Photo: Courtesy IfUD)
On Friday, at Rebuilding a Sustainable Haiti—a public symposium on planning strategies for the country’s future hosted by New York’s Institute for Urban Design—a common sentiment united nearly all of the panelists onstage, as well as those seated in Cooper Union’s packed Rose Auditorium: the scale of destruction from the January earthquake demands a transformation, and not merely a replication, of Haiti’s built environment. “Perhaps a better title for the symposium is ‘Building a Sustainable Haiti,’” Garry Pierre-Pierre, editor and founder of The Haitian Times, said in his opening remarks, which provided a background of Haitian politics from 1986 to the present and stressed the corrupt nature of the state. Read More
Trumpets, Please!
Anne Guiney and AN gang at the bar on Inauguration Day.
Former AN editor, Anne Guiney, has been named executive director of The Institute for Urban Design, the organization dedicated to fomenting debate about urban planning and development policy. With longtime experience as a magazine editor including stints at Metropolis and Architecture magazines, Guiney was part of the original team of editors at The Architect’s Newspaper, making sure that urban planning received as much coverage as architecture and design. Read More
Torch to Olympia
Olympia Kazi
The rumor has been confirmed that Greek-born, Italian-trained dynamo Olympia Kazi is taking over as executive director of the Van Alen Institute as of January 18. After a two-year stint as same at the Institute for Urban Design, where she put the spin on that org’s thirty-year mission to prove that “cities can be designed,” she will now, we presume, have a deeper pool and a wider horizon from which to launch some really big plans. Stay tuned for the official statement.
After Megaprojects
Residential and commercial construction alike doubled in New York under Mayor Bloomberg, who rezoned over a fifth of the city to create large parcels for development under the assumption that the economy would continue to boom. Now, stalled megaprojects like Brooklyn’s City Point complex leave depressing holes in neighborhoods, serving as daily reminders of the tenacious recession and leaving the city strapped for the cash it was counting on to fund other projects. What is to be done? Read More
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