Washington DC - January around town

Potomac River

Skating at the Washington Harbor

Phillips Collection - opened in 1921, first museum of modern art

street planting everywhere

Georgetown - M St Bank

M St

National Gallery of Art - East building. The NGA is an immense gallery displaying western art from the Middle Ages through to the 20th century, Renaissance works, Dutch masters, French Impressionists and all ages of American Art. John Russel Pope designed the Neo- Classical West building in 1941 and IM Pei the East building in 1978.

Chuck Close

 

National Gallery of Art - East building by  IM Pei

NYC Center for Architecture Foundation Education programs

The Center for Architecture, located just off Washington Square Park, offers a project based approach to teaching topics on the built environment in and outside the classroom.
Throughout the year they offer programs that include guided neighborhood walks, discussions, drawing, 2D design challenges and 3D model making.

For K -12 students they offer
LEARNING BY DESIGN : NY - Customized in-school residencies taught by design educators in collaboration with classroom teachers.

STUDENTDAY@THECENTER - Two hour practical workshops for school groups visiting the Center for Architecture.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT - Full and half day workshops for classroom teachers and administrators on built environment education teaching strategies, activities and curricula.

The Center also runs programs for families, after school, summer programs and week long design studios.

www.cfafoundation.org


Student work from recent workshops:

NYC Center for Architecture - The Edgeless School: Design for Learning

The Edgeless School: Design for Learning

  

Met with Catherine Teegarden, Director of Education at the Center for Architecture Foundation, AIA New York Chapter and viewed the current exhibition, The Edgeless School: Design for Learning, October 1, 2012 - and now extended to May 25, 2013.

The exhibition focuses on how technology is impacting on  the way in which architects and educators are approaching the design of learning environments.

What do you remember most from school: a favorite teacher, a great book, a singular moment of discovery? And what is the setting of that memory? Do you think the design of the space affected the learning experience?

The exhibition presents nineteen 21st century school buildings from across the US that blur distinctions between learning needs, approaches and environments.

Interview with Thomas Mellins, curator

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nryHy_K66A

NYC - January around town

the Tick Tock Diner

Washington Square Hotel - Greenwich Village

The WSH was home to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in the 60s

Washington Square Arch

WSH elevator tiles

MOMA Architecture and Design

MOMA Architecture and Design - sound panels

 

perfectly good Xmas trees out for collection

specialty Popcorn Shop Greenwich Village

24hr Doggy Daycare and Gym, Biscuits and Bath

Greenwich Village Clock Tower

Church in Harlem

Sylvia's Soul Food Harlem

Sylvia

Empowerhouse Passive House Design - Parsons The New School for Design

The Empowerhouse December 2012

Students of Parsons The New School for Design entered a design-build competition in the 2011 Solar Decathlon, with their entry, the Empowerhouse. The team won the affordibility section of the competition, with the passive house design costing $229, 000 US to build.
They went on to partner with Habitat for Humanity of Washington DC and the Department of Housing and Community Development to build the home specifically for the Washington DC neighbourhood of Deanwood. The house became a home for a family selected by Habitat for Humanity of Washington DC in December 2012. I plan to visit this project in the coming months.

“When we first entered into the Solar Decathlon competition, it did not make much sense to us to expend all the effort in designing and building a model house if it would not have a real impact,” said Orlando Velez, who went from working on the project as a student at The New School to being hired as the Operations Director full-time after graduation.
“All of us worked hard to make a house that’s amazingly energy efficient. It’s a really robust opportunity to teach the community about a whole host of environmental issues — green gardening, stormwater management, getting tax credits for using solar power, and more. It’s one of a kind. How could we just pack it up after the competition?”

See more at their website
http://parsit.parsons.edu/our-house/

NYC - Parsons The New School of Design

NYC - Ada Louise Huxtable, Champion of Livable Architecture

Ada Louise Huxtable on Park Ave in the 1970s             Bernard Gotfryd/Getty Images

Arrived in the city to read that Ada Louise Huxtable had died the day before, Monday January 7th 2013 at the age of 91. I went on to discover that she pioneered modern architectural criticism in the pages of the New York Times beginning in 1963, as the first full time architecture critic at an American newspaper. She won the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism in 1970. More recently she was the architecture critic of the Wall Street Journal. Here is an excerpt from her Obituary, published in the New York Times Tuesday, January 8 2013, by David W. Dunlap.

“Mrs. Huxtable invented a new profession,” a valedictory Times editorial said in 1981, just as she was leaving the newspaper, “and, quite simply, changed the way most of us see and think about man-made environments.”

At a time when architects were still in thrall to blank-slate urban renewal, Ms. Huxtable championed preservation — not because old buildings were quaint, or even necessarily historical landmarks, but because they contributed vitally to the cityscape. She was appalled at how profit dictated planning and led developers to squeeze the most floor area onto the least amount of land with the fewest public amenities.
Ms. Huxtable was assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art from 1946 to 1950. She was a Fulbright fellow, studying Italian architecture and design in 1950-52, and a Guggenheim fellow in 1958. She had also begun writing for architectural journals.

In 1958 she addressed a broader audience in The New York Times Magazine with an article criticizing how newspapers covered urban development. “Superblocks are built, the physiognomy and services of the city are changed, without discussion,” Ms. Huxtable wrote. “Architecture is the stepchild of the popular press.” Her interest in preservation did not make her an enemy of modernity. In “The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered: The Search for a Skyscraper Style” (1984), Ms. Huxtable said the glass curtain-wall skyscraper, epitomized by the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, offered “a superb vernacular, probably the handsomest and most useful set of architectural conventions since the Georgian row house.”

What infuriated her were “authentic reproductions” of historical architecture and “surrogate environments” like Colonial Williamsburg and master-planned communities like the Disney Company’s Celebration, Fla. “Private preserves of theme park and supermall increasingly substitute for nature and the public realm, while nostalgia for what never was replaces the genuine urban survival,” she wrote in “The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion” (1997).

Ultimately, however, what animated and sustained her were not the mistakes but the triumphs. As she said of New York City in The Times in 1968:
“When it is good, this is a city of fantastic strength, sophistication and beauty. It is like no other city in time or place. Visitors and even natives rarely use the words urban character or environmental style, but that is what they are reacting to with awe in the presence of massed, concentrated, steel, stone, power and life.”