Search results for "Syracuse University School of Architecture"

Legendary architect, founder of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners (originally I.M. Pei & Associates), and 1983 Pritzker Prize winner I.M. Pei reportedly passed away last night at age 102. Pei’s influence could be felt all over the world, from the National Gallery of Art, East Building, in Washington, D.C., to the iconic pyramidal glass entrance to the Louvre in Paris, to the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong. Pei’s lesser recognized, but still no less impressive, Brutalist museums like the 1968 Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, or the 1973 Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, New York, reflected Pei’s relationships with modernists like Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer and their work, and introduced groundbreaking modern architecture to smaller cities. Not all of Pei’s most notable work still stands, and some of his grandest designs stayed on the page. Sunning Plaza in Hong Kong was demolished in 2013, Terminal 6, the Sundrome of New York’s JFK International Airport was pulled down in 2011, and the 102-story, nuclear bomb-resistant Grand Central replacement, the Hyperboloid, never got off the ground (but was later immortalized in Never Built New York). Pei, originally born in Guangzhou, China, in 1917, moved to the United States in 1935 to attend architecture school at the University of Pennsylvania. Pei was unsatisfied and eventually left for MIT, before graduating and later attending the Harvard Graduate School of Design. AN will follow this announcement with a longer obituary.

Today, the University of California, Berkeley, announced Deanna Van Buren, co-founder of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS), as the recipient of this year’s Berkeley-Rupp Architecture Professorship and Prize. An award honoring architects or academics who show a commitment to sustainability and the community, it offers up the chance to teach and conduct research for a semester at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design (CED). Van Buren is the mind behind DJDS, an Oakland-based nonprofit aiming to holistically transform the American jail system through a vision called restorative justice. As a national leader and advocate for smart justice architecture, her work zeroes in on supportive justice interventions that can help solve the serious issues caused by mass incarceration. Her architecture and real estate development practice, which she launched with Kyle Rawlins in 2015, works with government, non-profit, and community partners to spread awareness and create design projects that address social justice needs. “Deanna is a visionary leader, whose design work and activism are reshaping the cultural construct of justice in the U.S.,” said CED Dean Jennifer Wolch in a statement. “Her support for underserved communities, and efforts to create spaces that cultivate diversity in our field, exemplify the values we strive to encourage with this prize.”   Van Buren’s extensive background showcases her commitment to the role of architect-activist. Last November, she spoke at a TEDWomen conference where she challenged the audience to consider what the world would like without prisons, and what we could build in their place. Before beginning DJDS, Van Buren founded the public interest design studio FOURM, and earlier this year started BIG Oakland, a new co-working space for minority- and women-owned architecture, engineering, and construction companies. Van Buren previously held positions at Perkins+Will, The Buchan Group, and Eric R. Kuhn & Associates where she completed institutional, educational, and urban design projects around the world. Her portfolio with DJDS includes a handful of peacemaking centers, roving villages, and housing units for youth in both Syracuse and Oakland, among other places. Her latest project is Restore Oakland, a restorative justice and economics center in East Oakland that, when open next spring, will be the first of its kind in the United States. Her team also recently launched the Pop-Up Resource Village in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, which brings resources and dynamic programming to in-need communities of color via mobile architecture and nature. Van Buren believes in the power of design and creative placemaking as means to help keep people out of the jail system and provide room for healing as well as training on the systemic injustices that stem from inequality. “Architecture is a potent medium for shifting and solidifying and fomenting movements,” she said. “We can’t do much without space. We can’t launch movements without a place for us to gather that is safe and nourishing.” Among her many accolades, Van Buren is the only architect to have ever been awarded the Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, and she’s also held the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. As part of the Berkeley-Rupp Professorship and Prize, she will be awarded $100,000 and the visiting professorship at UC Berkeley starting next fall. There she’ll focus on a book project and teach an intensive seminar that explores architectural responses for peace-building. She’ll also give a public lecture and hold a gallery exhibition. Past recipients of the Berkeley-Rupp prize include Carme Pinós in 2016, Sheila Kennedy in 2014, and Deborah Berke in 2012.

A new school in Rotterdam will teach students to think critically about the links between urbanism and migration. Announced last month, the Independent School for the City will offer post-graduate students the chance to "celebrate complexity and contradiction in cities, and defend it against the forces that are making everything the same," according to Michelle Provoost, co-founder of Crimson Architectural Historians which is spearheading the new educational outlet. The school is a joint-venture between Crimson Architectural Historians, Dutch-based activist-architects Zones Urbaines Sensibles (ZUS), and DeDependance, a platform for city culture and debate in Rotterdam. Its pedagogy draws from Crimson’s and ZUS’s critical, activist approach to the city that seeks to effect real change by blurring the lines between critique and practice, as well as research and policy, and by initiating incremental change rather than large-scale city planning projects. The school builds on the belief that architectural, economic, spatial, and social strategies for the city should be based on real, first-hand empirical research into the city. Research methods will include filmmaking, journalism, history, art, graphic design, gaming, fieldwork, traveling, planning, finance, and architecture. The school will be located in Rotterdam but will be connected to an international network of cities, schools, offices, and companies. Initial course offerings include a series of masterclasses with professionals from various fields such as architect and exhibition designers Herman Kossman, urban sociologist Arnold Reijndorp, as well as designers Edith Gruson, and Gerard Hadders. Students will also learn from architect-filmmaker Jord Den Hollander and leaders from DeDependance. The first year’s topic of investigation will be migration, a subject that builds on the ongoing Crimson project City of Comings and Goings. After an initial three-month period of skill-development, the students will spend a semester abroad, expanding their research and testing their strategies in Shenzhen, Ghana, or Kiev. On their return, they will present their research in designs, strategies, or stories. The school will collaborate with CANactions in Ukraine, the Strelka Institute in Moscow, as well as ZUS and Syracuse University in New York. Special lecturers include Olly Wainright, Urban Think Tank's Alfredo Brillembourg, Assemble's Maria Lisogorskaya, Peter Barber, and Ghanaian architect/novelist Lesley Lokko.

New York City’s eighth annual Archtober, a month-long design festival hosted by the Center for Architecture, will begin Monday, October 1, with Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, an exhibition exploring hip-hop culture’s impact on the built environment. “Over the last five decades, hip-hop’s primary means of expression—deejaying, emceeing, b-boying, and graffiti—have become globally recognized creative practices in their own right,” reads the graffiti-tagged press release. “Hip-Hop Architecture produces spaces, buildings, and environments that embody the creative energy evident in these means of hip-hop expression.” Close to the Edge, which was curated by Sekou Cooke, an assistant professor at Syracuse University’s School of Architecture, is the first exhibition dedicated to the hip-hop architecture movement. It will include projects by a diverse group of architects, academics, and students presented alongside paintings by legendary graffiti artist David “Chino BYI” Villorente. The opening will also feature extended hours with a live DJ performance. According to Cooke, the exhibition is not meant to identify hip-hop architecture as a particular style of building, although he welcomes debate from those who disagree, but it is meant to show how architecture can embrace the culture of hip-hop to become a more inclusive and constructive practice. “I want people to come who may not even know what hip-hop is,” Cooke told The Architect's Newspaper. “When people hear ‘hip-hop architecture’ they imagine buildings that are dancing to a specific genre of music, but hip-hop culture goes much deeper than that. It’s really about having people consider the work that they do in a more humanistic way, so that they’re thinking about the people that their work is affecting, the culture of the people they’re working for, and the ways a typically marginalized group of people sculpt their built environment as architecture.” Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture will be on view through January 12, 2019, at the Center for Architecture in New York City. The exhibition will be accompanied by speaking events, panel discussions, and workshops by BlackSpace and the AIANY.

This is a preview of our September issue, out tomorrow. What happened to speculation in architecture? At a recent symposium at the Yale School of Architecture titled “Aesthetic Activism,” Dean of the Syracuse School of Architecture Michael Speaks noted that curiously, architecture has lost its penchant for speculation in recent years. He cited the two most recent Venice Biennales as evidence of this trend, as the curators chose to look at the elements of building (Rem Koolhaas’s Elements, 2014) and reporting on reality in regions beyond what the Biennale had traditionally addressed (Alejandro Aravena’s Reporting from the Front, 2016). He also discussed the Chicago Biennial in 2015, which arguably focused on practice, rather than architecture. What happened to architecture’s ability to speculate on the world around us, as was the ordinary in the 20th century, from Le Corbusier and the modernists to Archigram and the radical architects of the 1960s and 1970s? In the latest issue of The Architect's Newspaper (AN), we set out to survey the state of architectural speculation today. AN Contributing Editor Sam Lubell will be opening the exhibition Never Built New York, which features proposals that were never realized. You could say that looking at the history of unbuilt architecture is speculation. So we set out to find what might be in the Never Built exhibition of 2050. What is speculation today? We found that in architecture, most speculation is more like plausible futures. It is being developed by private industry in some cases, well within the realm of possibility. Many think that self-driving cars are a revolutionary technology, and are a matter of “when,” not “if.” But why have so few architects gotten out in front of this technology looking for opportunities to change the city? Solar technologies, like those being developed at Tesla, would also have the potential to radically change how we build. Our research confirms that in many ways Speaks is correct in his thinking about a lack of speculation. Architects are not really thinking much about new ways of living and relating to the world outside of our own history and discourse. I would argue that the upcoming Chicago Biennial appears to confirm this idea. We did manage to find an interesting mélange of projects that project toward that future. From automation and smart cities, to floating islands (front page), there are some plausible futures that might be very real someday. So it is not necessarily speculation, but just futurist realism, which we found to be a fruitful endeavor. In an interview with Amelie Klein of the Vitra Design Museum about her exhibition as part of the Vienna Biennale, she reported that many of the most speculative work in architecture that she has come across is actually happening in the realm of construction, such as the algorithms used by Achim Menges at the University of Stuttgart, Institute for Computational Design, to minimize material use and create new ways of making. While the discipline might be struggling to imagine new ways of living, it is not a boring time for architecture. The world around us is changing quickly, and we can see several new futures simultaneously developing before our eyes. It may not be about predicting or producing new futures, but about reflecting on the present and what plausible near futures could be on the horizon and how they will affect our cities.

To walk the streets of a city with Diane meant to be move slowly and with focus, and to often come to a complete standstill when the discussion at hand was primary over all else. This immersion was in striking contrast to her gait and quickness in the halls of Cooper Union and her brisk efficiency in the orchestration of a construction site. She lived in accord with the tenets of her practice and her teaching, and her intellectual rigor and intensity were applied to all endeavors. She believed deeply in the necessary confrontation of the existing with the ideal. The rub of dueling conditions as the source of artistic inspiration was a concept for Diane that spanned from Dante’s Divine Comedy (the introduction to our course at Pratt) to how she engaged the eccentricities of building within a given condition. To work alongside Diane on the job site was a demonstration of architecture as both an art in form and a theater piece with a unique casting call and stage directions in a whirlwind toward exquisite results. In the center was Diane, always a cutting sight in her effortless, yet careful wardrobe and its accents; the most important were her eyeglasses. She had wanted glasses since an early age and was thrilled when they became a necessity.

Diane’s ability to enjoy life was to make the best possible conditions for living, eating, thinking—whatever happened to be the pursuit of the moment. She had a gusto for food and ate with the same enjoyment and abandon as when she watered the garden at one of her many 9^th street studio locations, a bit messy but with pure joy, flinging water so that it hit not only the plants but also the table she designed and the chairs and cushions. She was a talented cook and brought recipes from all over the world back to the studio, where she would regret that we did not have a dedicated chef on staff as Scarpa had when she visited his Venetian studio in the ’70s. Decades later when we visited Venice she insisted the first act must be to go immediately to Harry’s Bar, which was filled with Carnival revelers.

Wherever Diane lived it was always in a work of architecture, whether by her own hand or by selection. She would spend the summers in Long Island renting the guesthouse from Charles Gwathmey’s mother, and she lived for many years on a floor in William Lescaze’s townhouse on 48^th street, where she was later married. In a metropolitan style, she had simply stopped by and made an inquiry to his widow if there were rooms for rent; Diane later designed an addition to her D.C. residence. Diane would note that she saw the principals of Hejduk’s Wall House in the Lescaze townhouse. Her intrinsic ability to see the lineages of work and continuity of thought allowed her to absorb, project, and hypothesize. She created a literary a-chronological world of architecture that is both deeply engaging and spectacularly liberating.

As a professor she preserved the sanctity and dignity of the students and adhered to the highest aspirations of academic sovereignty. She treated us with respect and demanded a critical forum for the discussion of work, investing in each student close readings as well as the independence to shape our studio projects. Under her teaching team, our class, and many others, created spectacular work from both expected and unexpected sources. Her gravitational field pulled people from near and afar: My friend and classmate Jack immediately applied to Cooper after having Diane during her tenure in the Hyde Chair at the University of Nebraska. Diane herself applied to Cooper as an art student at the recommendation of George Segal, whom she met in Syracuse in a high school summer program. Pei Cobb Freed & Partners’ Everson Museum of Art was in construction nearby; they would be second firm she would work for after initiating her professional career in the office of Richard Meier.

Most striking about Diane was her precise language, her careful articulation and her prescience to the gulf between thought and speech. Her unrelenting attention to meaning and complete absorption in structure were a means to penetrate through the contrived and conventional. Diane demanded that we engage the world not as it is, but as it should be. She entitled an unfinished book, Mind Over Matter.

At The Architect's Newspaper, we're plain addicted to Instagram. Sure, we love seeing Brutalist concrete through "Inkwell" or "Ludwig" filters, but there's also no better place to see where architects are getting their inspiration, how they're documenting the built environment, and where they've traveled of late. Below, we bring you some of the best Instagrams of this past week! (Also, don't forget to check out our Instagram account here.) SO-IL's Florian Idenburg was in Shanghai approving of Gensler's aptly-named Shanghai Tower.

 

Remarkably good Gensler tower

A post shared by Florian Idenburg (@florianidenburg) on Aug 2, 2017 at 2:05am PDT

Olson Kundig sent this update from Dornbirn, Áustria, where one of its employees is participating in a two-week Earthwork Building Workshop. The course is part of the firm's traveling fellowship program.

inside the former chapel where Earthwork students will refinish the interior, Thomas Künzi is the tadlakt instructor, discussing the finer points of working with the material — the team worked together to apply multiple layers of this Moroccan lime plaster technique, in alternating stages to coat, protect, and repair the finish over the course of the process • (photos and reportage by @jarrihasnain, from his #ok_fellowship at Earthwork in Dornbirn, Austria)

A post shared by Olson Kundig (@olsonkundig) on Aug 1, 2017 at 11:14am PDT

David Adjaye was in Port of Spain, Trinidad and admiring the Hasely Crawford stadium, which was completed in 1982.

 

Double sided seating!👀 Hasely Crawford stadium. #trinidadandtobago #portofspain #structuralsteel #stadium

A post shared by David Adjaye (@adjaye_visual_sketchbook) on Aug 1, 2017 at 1:38pm PDT

Bjarke Ingels found his way to the set of HBO's Westworld—we think it's the Melody Ranch in Santa Clarita, California—and that didn't stop him from enjoying other uniquely West Coast diversions, like this high tech–styled dune buggy.

 

Next stop the Playa

A post shared by Bjarke ingels (@bjarkeingels) on Jul 31, 2017 at 6:39pm PDT

Spanish architect Andrés Jaque re-grammed this glorious drawing from his Advanced Design Studio at Columbia's GSAPP.

 

Amazing project by Yu In Zheng and Royi, for a Post-Extractive Atlantic life, at my Advanced Design Studio at @columbiagsapp !!!!! Huge thanks to all students, to TA Rui Guan and jurors Carlos Brillembourg, Diana Cristóbal, @mimi_hoang , @mariana.ik , @sabinevalenga and Enrique Walter for an amazing discussion !!!!!! #architecture #archiporn @superarchitects #deviceorientedarchitecture #Transmaterial #OfficeForPoliticalInnovation

A post shared by Andrés Jaque (@andres_jaque) on Aug 2, 2017 at 11:24pm PDT

And while we're on student work, Michael Speaks, dean of Syracuse University's School of Architecture, was proud to show oodles of models and drawings produced by high school students during Syracuse's summer architecture program.

 

Exhibition Syracuse Architecture Summer High School Program taught by Assistant Professors Molly Hunker and Greg Corso. Brilliant work, brilliant instructors. Thanks to everyone for making this such a success! @syr_arch @syr_arch_nyc @syr_arch_florence @syraso @aias_syracuse @thisisposit

A post shared by Michael Speaks (@mspeaks) on Jul 28, 2017 at 3:14pm PDT

The Art Institute of Chicago's Zoë Ryan teased the upcoming exhibit Past Forward: Architecture and Design at the Art Institute, with exhibition design by Julia di Castri, visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The walls are going up. Installation design by @jdicastri Past Forward: Architecture and Design at the Art Institute opens September 12. #pastforward @artinstitutechi #design #architecture

A post shared by Zoë Ryan (@zoeryanprojects) on Aug 3, 2017 at 7:10am PDT

Last but not least, WORKac Co-founder Dan Wood posted this preview of his firm's contribution to the upcoming Chicago Architecture Biennial.

 

Getting ready for the @chicagoarchitecturebiennial

A post shared by Dan Wood (@dxwood) on Aug 1, 2017 at 2:07pm PDT

Jonathan Massey, dean of architecture and professor at California College of the Arts, has been named the next dean of the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He will follow Dean Monica Ponce de Leon, who is now the architecture dean at Princeton, and Robert Fishman, professor of architecture and urban planning, who has been serving as interim dean. "Taubman College has excelled by taking Detroit, the Great Lakes region and other sites around the globe as frameworks for research on the challenges and opportunities posed by processes of modernization," Massey said. "I am excited to work with U-M students, faculty and staff to generate architecture and planning strategies that expand economic opportunity, increase equitable access to resources, design better health and create the operating system for smart cities." Massey earned a Bachelor of Arts degree, summa cum laude, from Princeton University. He earned a Master of Architecture degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a doctoral degree in history and theory of architecture from Princeton. Massey has worked for architecture firms including Frank O. Gehry and Associates and has taught at Barnard College, Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute, and Syracuse University, where he served as chair of the Bachelor of Architecture program from 2011-2014. He is the author of the book, "Crystal and Arabesque: Claude Bragdon, Ornament, and Modern Architecture," and in 2006, Massey co-founded the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, "a team of scholars focused on how buildings shape processes of political, economic and social transformation." He also edits The Aggregate Website.

The clean, white-walled exhibition space, the now-preferred one for displaying art, did not materialize overnight, as Mark Wigley and others show in their histories of exhibition design. Sheetrocked walls with smooth, joint-compounded planes, set inside an old industrial building with clear polyurethane wood floors, exposed beams, and metal straps, can be traced back to the 1980s.

One of the first interior spaces to show the power of these minimalist white-walled spaces was likely the Dia Art Foundation at 548 West 22^nd Street in Chelsea, New York, designed in 1985. This space was designed by Richard Gluckman, who can—as much as any other architect—be credited with creating spaces influenced by the minimalist art of the period.

His firm, now Gluckman Tang Architects (Dana Tang, who has worked in the office since 1995, became his partner in 2015), has built on this minimalism-inspired base of design ideas with 22 employees that design scores of major projects. In the last three years they have become a truly global practice with important projects on three continents. Gluckman Tang always seems to have an impressive portfolio of museums, galleries, and institutional projects on the boards. It, like any firm, doesn’t realize all of its commission or competition entries, but it is clear that it is a firm that institutions trust to create an appropriate and workable spaces, like: the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea, and the Zhejiang University Art and Archaeology Museum in China. Gluckman, whose first major New York project was a townhouse for Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil in 1977, has also built on this foundation to create scores of lofts, private homes, and other residential projects since the 1970s. Gluckman Tang seems to have hit a sweet spot as an office with a manageable number of employees and a reputation that ensures that they will continue to interview with enviable clients offering desirable, even glamorous, commissions. William Menking

Dineen Hall, Syracuse University College of Law Syracuse, New York

Dineen Hall is a new 200,000-square-foot facility that anchors Syracuse University’s West campus expansion with a distinctive five-story state-of-the-art building for the College of Law. A central atrium at the main level visibly linking the core elements—a library, a celebratory space, a ceremonial courtroom—is positioned beneath a green roof that creates a seasonal outdoor terrace, with the skylit vertical axis introducing natural light throughout the building. The iconic ceremonial courtroom will be visible from inside and outside the building, signifying the law school’s inherent accessibility and transparency. De Maria Pavilion Long Island, New York This is the second Gluckman Tang–designed single-artist exhibition structure on this Long Island estate (the firm created the earlier Noguchi Garden Pavilion in 2004). A board-formed concrete interior frames a selection of Walter De Maria works, and is naturally lit by a large skylight and window-wall. A brick exterior references the 1920s garden wall. Zhejiang University Museum of Art and Archaeology Zhejiang Sheng, China This facility is a teaching museum that supports research and study of the arts on a campus for Zhejiang University. The contemporary design alludes to various aspects of traditional Chinese architecture and garden design. It brings together three major elements—public exhibition, art study and storage, and academics. The museum’s entry and lobby overlook a garden along a canal to the south. The four-story academic wing has its own entry facing the new campus to the north, and contains the library, auditorium, classrooms, seminar rooms, study centers, conservation lab, and education center.

The Architect’s Newspaper (AN)’s inaugural 2013 Best of Design Awards featured six categories. Since then, it's grown to 26 exciting categories. As in years past, jury members (Erik Verboon, Claire Weisz, Karen Stonely, Christopher Leong, Adrianne Weremchuk, and AN’s Matt Shaw) were picked for their expertise and high regard in the design community. They based their judgments on evidence of innovation, creative use of new technology, sustainability, strength of presentation, and, most importantly, great design. We want to thank everyone for their continued support and eagerness to submit their work to the Best of Design Awards. We are already looking forward to growing next year’s coverage for you.

2016 Best of Design Award for Temporary Installation: Rounds

Architect: SPORTS Location: Lake Forest, IL

Rounds is a temporary plywood theater pavilion created for an artist colony just north of Chicago. It was the winner of the Adrian Smith Prize, which is sponsored by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture and included a $15,000 production grant and a ten-person, design-build residency for three weeks at Ragdale. Departing from the bandshell structure and stage most commonly deployed in this setting, Rounds establishes a dynamic and playful performance surface. Small-scale curves in the ring’s ribbon-like design act as lounge spaces while mid-scale waves serve both as covered stage areas and portals to the inner space of the ring. The largest undulation is designed for the main stage area, which can be broken down into smaller parts and distributed around the ring for several concurrent performances.

Additional support for the project was provided by Syracuse University School of Architecture and W.E. O’Neil.

Build Team Greg Corso, Molly Hunker, Jordan Nelson, Nick Zukauskas, Kevin Lenhart, Preston Welker, Sean Morgan, Dabota Wilcox, Jon Anthony, Monika  England, Kokeith  Perry, Sarah Beaudoin

Engineer Arup

Landscape Architect Rosborough Partners Fabrication Consultant Knowhow Shop Exterior Finish Stuc-O-Flex Honorable Mention, Temporary Installation: Floating The Waller

Architect: Ten Eyck Landscape Architects Location: Austin, TX

This installation of 200 empty illuminated inner tubes floating on Austin’s Waller Creek was conceived to highlight the need for improving water quality, ecological health, and public accessibility in urban waterways.

Honorable Mention, Temporary Installation: Town Branch Water Walk

Architect: SCAPE Landscape Architecture Location: Lexington, KY

The design intervention is not a physical landscape, but a communication tool conceived with the Lexington, Kentucky, Downtown Development Authority. A self-guided podcast tour of the Town Branch Culvert gives a broad understanding of the biophysical area, reveals the invisible waters beneath the city, and demonstrates the impacts each resident can have.

This is the twenty-second in a series of guests posts that feature Archtober Building of the Day tours! With only six days left in the month, the Archtober 2016 Building of the Day tours are sadly coming to a close. We've seen a variety of new and innovative spaces mixed with old favorites and hidden gems that presented a mosaic of New York’s most impressive architecture. This year’s list would not be complete without Marcel Breuer’s iconic Whitney Museum, now known as the Met Breuer.

The Met Breuer, which opened in March of this year, houses the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s expanding modern and contemporary collections within its modest 29,000 square feet of exhibition space. When the Met moved into the building, its main goals were to restore and rejuvenate the space while still preserving the patina of the past. To that end, the Met gave the former Whitney the kind of exacting precision and gentle care it uses on its most treasured art objects.

That precision and care resulted in a building that both honors Breuer’s original vision and updates the space to meet the challenges of contemporary museums. The Met enlisted the help of Beyer Blinder Belle, a firm that specializes in the revitalization of historic buildings and has significant experience with the restoration of other midcentury modernist icons (Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center at JFK International Airport and Wallace Harrison’s Lincoln Center Promenade are two great examples). The restoration of the building took just under a year.

The updates that the Met and Beyer Blinder Belle incorporated show an informed understanding of Breuer’s subtle, graceful materiality and his ingenious structural engineering. A multitude of restoration and revitalization techniques needed to be devised for the various materials used in the building, which includes terrazzo, concrete, walnut parquet, and the famed gray granite exterior. The bluestone floors were treated with a natural, black wax to bring a soft luster while the walls, which required both chemical cleaners and water, were treated with a gentle, painterly approach. Breuer designed with the effects of time on materials in mind. The Met and Beyer Blinder Belle followed this example by leaving the bronze handrails of the staircase unfinished, allowing them to show their wear.

The lobby showcases the updates made for a contemporary museum with greater visitor numbers. The space was completely redesigned with multiple ticket sales points, self-service kiosks, and a substantially decreased retail footprint. Additionally, the lighting in the lobby has been updated to Breuer bulbs that can dim and provide a warmer uniformity of color temperature. The plexiglass and stone information center originally installed has been changed to a LED screen.

For the time being, the Met and the Whitney share ownership of the building. The Met will occupy the Breuer masterpiece for eight years, with a possible extension to 15 should the Met Breuer prove to be a success.

Despite its fame, the Breuer building is not a New York City landmark. Perhaps with a new tenant and renewed interest in the space, the building will get the recognition it deserves. Otherwise, its fate will be another question for the city and architecture lovers, should the Met end up vacating.

About the author: Anna Gibertini is a freelance journalist based in the New York metropolitan area. She contributes regularly to The ArtBlog, a Philadelphia-based arts and culture publication, and has had work published in Charleston, South Carolina’s Post & Courier and Syracuse, New York’s The Post Standard. She recently graduated from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications with a master’s in arts journalism.

This is the fourteenth in a series of guests posts that feature Archtober Building of the Day tours! Picture this: a spacious and inviting apartment snug in the heart of Chelsea. Its crisp, white walls and warm ash wood flooring provides an impeccably balanced sense of trendiness and coziness. West-facing windows offer a glimpse of sunsets on the Hudson River from the 15th floor of the historic co-op, located at 201 West 16th Street. The only catch? It’s 400 square feet, the legal minimum size for a Chelsea apartment. “Spacious” and “400 square feet” may sound oxymoronic, but Architecture Workshop’s Robert Garneau, AIA, LEEP AP, made it work. And the “Pivot apartment,” as it is called, ended up working for him in return: His Brooklyn-based firm won an AIANY Honor Award for Interior Architecture this year. Owners Paul and Billie Andersson had two design parameters that Garneau had to meet: The apartment should sleep up to six adults and provide enough space to comfortably seat 10 to 12 guests for Thanksgiving. What Garneau created easily met those demands and then went the extra mile. The Pivot apartment is so named for its pièce de résistance: a moveable wall in the living room that reveals an expansive but intimate bedroom space when opened. The room includes a queen-sized murphy bed and an expandable couch that can accommodate up to four adults, as well as a TV and generously sized closet. And there’s still room to walk to the kitchen for a midnight snack. The interior wall, which doubles as the closet, is fabricated with the same ash wood as the floor, creating a functionally sound-proof space. A sliding door in the kitchen can fully enclose the bedroom, making it light-proof as well. “I wanted to create a cottage or cabin feeling for the bedroom,” explained Garneau, an impressive feat in a metropolis like Manhattan. That warm, homey feeling is carried over into the bathroom, which is tiled with travertine, illuminated by recessed ceiling LEDs, and separated from the rest of the apartment by a mahogany door. The bathroom can accommodate up to two people through the inclusion of a glass pane that pivots out from the wall—essentially a European-style shower. The floor is imperceptibly pitched to allow water to run into the floor drain and mirrored dark wood cabinetry provides more than enough storage space in this diminutive bathroom. The living room and kitchen radiate a trendy feel with white walls, gray kitchen cabinetry, and stainless steel fixtures. The kitchen is another marvel of ingenuity, with a discrete fridge and freezer tucked in underneath the counter top and a kitchen table that can be raised to double as additional counter space. “You’ve got to know a few things about this apartment to live here,” said Andersson, referring to the multiplicity of movable parts and hidden storage spaces that make up this compact home. But those little innovative surprises are ultimately what make Pivot such a delight. “It’s like a big toy,” said Garneau. “This project was so much fun to make.” About the author: Anna Gibertini is a freelance journalist based in the New York metropolitan area. She contributes regularly to The ArtBlog, a Philadelphia-based arts and culture publication, and has had work published in Charleston, South Carolina’s Post & Courier and Syracuse, New York’s The Post Standard. She recently graduated from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications with a master’s in arts journalism.