Presentations by Adrienne Cortez, Susannah Drake, Julie Farris, Mark Rakatansky, and Situ Studio
Thursday, January 15, 2009
7:00 p.m.
The Urban Center
457 Madison Avenue
This program was part of the 2008-09 program calendar. Click here for information about our current season.
A new program designed to provide a platform for League-sponsored recipients of New York State Council on the Arts Independent Projects grants to share their research. Projects include “nyc: uncapped” by Adrienne Cortez; Susannah Drake’s “Reconnection Strategies: BQE Trench in Brownstone Brooklyn”; “Temporary Landscape: A Pasture for an Urban Space” and “Urban Meadow Brooklyn” by Julie Farris; Mark Rakatansky’s “How to Read a Building”; and Situ Studio’s “Mapping Frontiers.”
Click thumbnails below to view more images.
A gushing hydrant drenching happy kids is an iconic summer image. But when the hydrant isn’t open, it disappears into the white noise of the street. In Adrienne Cortez’s project, “nyc: uncapped,” the hydrant, and its larger context within New York City’s water supply system, is brought into focus. Exploring the conflict between the classic urban summer activity and the unsustainable nature of the practice, “nyc: uncapped” investigates the physical and social aspects of the streets in which frequent hydrant uncappings take place and suggests alternative strategies.
Adrienne Cortez is a registered landscape architect with an interest in the opportunities presented by marginalized or degraded sites. Current work includes the master plan and sustainable development guidelines for a mixed-use project in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, as well as design research and planning on a brownfield redevelopment in Dallas, Texas. She received her B.A. in Art History from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas and her M.L.A from the University of Virginia. She has previously worked with Balmori Associates, Deborah Nevins and Associates, and D.I.R.T. studio in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The construction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway divided the existing brownstone neighborhoods of Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, and Red Hook with a 6-lane highway. Susannah Drake of dlandstudio in the project, “Reconnection Strategies: BQE Trench in Brownstone Brooklyn,” developed strategies to reconnect these neighborhoods and adjacent landscape infrastructure and ameliorate environmental impacts. The resulting plan works to improve environmental and economic vitality through the addition of green walls and street trees. The ultimate realization of the project will be a new park constructed over the BQE that reconnects these separated neighborhoods and provides recreational space for this park-poor area. dlandstudio is currently meeting with community members, neighborhood associations, and government officials to actualize this plan.
Susannah Drake is the Principal of dlandstudio llc, a multidisciplinary design firm that includes landscape architects, urban designers, sculptors, scientists, and architects. dlandstudio’s recent public projects include the Gowanus Canal Sponge Park, a public open space system designed to absorb and remediate urban storm water, and the Brooklyn Bridge Pop-up Park, a temporary waterfront open space that attracted almost two hundred thousand visitors over its six weeks of operation in the summer of 2008. She received her M.Arch and M.L.A. degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and is currently the President of The New York ASLA.
“Temporary Landscape: A Pasture for an Urban Space,” a temporary landscape installation in the Columbia Waterfront District of Brooklyn, combined grassy rolling hills against a film projection on the site’s back walls, which served to extend the landscape. Following the project’s de-installation, Julie Farris reconstituted her project at a nearby, unused Parks Department site to create “Urban Meadow Brooklyn,” a permanent community garden, which reused the soil and material from “Temporary Landscape.” “Urban Meadow Brooklyn” was in collaboration with Balmori Associates and The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation’s Greenthumb agency.
A native New Yorker, Julie Farris graduated with a B.A. in Anthropology from Vassar College and an M.L.A. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. In 2004, she started her own landscape studio, XS Space, which is focused on the implementation of temporary landscapes in the urban context. She had previously work at M. Paul Friedberg and Partners, HLW International, and Balmori Associates.
Utilizing the latest software, an innovative set of digital procedures have been developed to provide more accessible, animated, and informative visual readings of buildings, providing new forms of critical and historical analysis in Mark Rakatansky’s project, “How to Read a Building.” These techniques will be used to read closely a trio of prominent post-war critics (Tafuri, Rowe, Banham) reading a trio of exemplary buildings (by Piranesi, Giulio, Moretti). This project is particularly accessible to a wide range of individuals, from the general public to student and practitioners. It will produce a primer on visual acuity, a step by step reading with incisive diagrams and text and animations — taking apart buildings and historical readings piece by piece to see what makes them tick. Formal techniques are utilized to draw forth questions of cultural meaning, and questions of meaning are utilized to draw forth questions of form. The project emphasizes the techniques and performance of visual reading in order to rethink how any building (and any critic) performs, so that the reader can develop and refine their own forms of close reading.
Mark Rakatansky teaches in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia. He is principal of Mark Rakatansky Studio, a multimedia practice that focuses on the performative capabilities of design: exploring how design elements can develop as characters as they engage in and through their particular spatial scenes. His most recent design work includes a Psychosocial Rehabilitation Center for persons with mental illness in Kanakapura, India; Turning House in Sugok-ri, Korea; and Recombinant Campus, a series of designs for Queens College. He received his B.A. from University of California Santa Cruz and his M.Arch from Univeristy of California Berkeley.
The mapping of strategic zones has always been a central component of geopolitical discourse, asserts the project “Mapping Frontiers” by Situ Studio. Maps – and the attempt to assert national interests through the representation of geographic space—undergird strategic action. The dual function of the geopolitical map as both a rhetorical device and analytic tool afford it an especially interesting place in the history of great power relations. Modes of geographic representation have evolved along with the advances in technology that have transformed competition among states and non-state actors. This project explores the maps of contemporary geo-strategic discourse in the context of this evolution in the visualization of global politics.
Situ Studio was founded in 2003 in Brooklyn, New York, while its five partners were studying architecture at the Cooper Union. Concentrating on research, design and fabrication, the firm utilizes emerging technologies at the intersection of architecture and a variety of other disciplines. Recent projects include the design and fabrication of the Solar Pavilion 3 in June, 2008, which was installed at the CitySol Festival in New York City. The partners teach at Pratt Institute and Columbia University.
This program was made possible in part by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
