A panel discussion based on the new issue of 306090, Dimension
Basar Girit, David Hays, Chris McVoy, and David Ruy
Moderated by Emily Abruzzo and Jonathan D. Solomon
Thursday, May 28, 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.

Architecture’s Dimensions will be an opportunity to discuss the quality of “dimension,” in architectural theory and practice.  David Hays, Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Chris McVoy, Senior Partner, Steven Holl Architects; David Ruy, director of Ruy Klein; Basar Girit of Situ Studio; and 306090 book editors Emily Abruzzo and Jonathan Solomon will consider how “dimension,” as both scale and authenticity, drives architecture’s latest engagement in imagining and forming the actual.

After over two decades of investment in virtual architecture, there is no more compelling problem in architecture today than that of the real, and the transition from virtual thereto – for it is in this very return to the material world that one sees the most eloquent explorations of the virtual.

Qualities of the real have always been contingent upon the virtual, or abstract. Scale — in time and space — is relative. Even the very terms of measurement turn out to be constructs, yet the abilities to draw, communicate, and build are fundamentally reliant on them. Dimension’s relationship to design is even more vexing when one considers that all the precision attainable, all the tabulated data, cannot account for the absolute thrill or feeling of trepidation that a space may inspire in its built form.

The panel will consider: The relationship of the hand and the machine; the relationship of precision and imprecision; the relevance of scale; and the meaning of dimension in architectural practice today.

Organized by The Architectural League; co-sponsored by Urban Center Books.

Image: Dispatchwork, Jan Vorman, Venti Eventi, Bocchignano, Italy 2007.

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Richard Garber, Scott Marble, Neil Meredith, Coren Sharples

In the last 25 years, the broad use of computer software has revolutionized the way architectural design proposals are generated and documented.  Much of this work has occurred in either visualization or formal speculation – largely academic concerns; or in conventional documentation and management – largely professional preoccupations. This separation, often articulated as one between theory and practice, becomes amplified between architects and those that build their design proposals.  Traditionally, this translation between architect and builder has invited breaks, or gaps, in what should be a continuous and interrelated process of design translation and building actualization.

Closing the Gap, a new issue of AD, brings together academics, architects, engineers, and construction managers each engaged in the use of BIMs, or Building Information Models, which synthesize advances in design computing with better construction management, in the actualization, from design to construction, of complex building projects.  Richard Garber, Coren Sharples, Dennis Shelden, and Scott Marble, contributors to the issue, will discuss advances in these technologies and their applications in a number of built projects.

Richard Garber is an assistant professor at the New Jersey School of Architecture (NJSOA), where he teaches design studios and directs the school’s FABLAB. His work involves the use of computer simulation and computer numerically controlled (CNC) hardware in the generation of innovative design, construction, and assembly solutions. In 2007 his practice, GRO Architects, won the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s re:Construction Competition. The resulting work, Best Pedestrian Route, was fabricated at NJSOA’s FABLAB and was installed at the corner of Broadway and John Street in Lower Manhattan. In 2008 GRO won an AIA Merit Award and a New York Designs Award from the Architectural League of New York for these efforts. He was also the ‘Emerging Architect’ Visiting Assistant Professor at Barnard College in 2007, with Nicole Robertson. He was previously a project manager at SHoP Architects and at Greg Lynn FORM. He holds architecture degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Columbia University.
www.groarc.com

Neil Meredith is a former Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Michigan where he operated the school’s Digital Fabrication Lab and taught in the areas of Design, Construction, and Fabrication. He holds an M.Arch degree from the University of Michigan and is the founder of the design and fabrication office Sheet. Current research in experimental ceramic building materials undertaken at the European Ceramic Workcentre (EKWC) in The Netherlands is available in a recent publication titled Loose Fit. He is currently located in New York working as a parametric modeling consultant for Gehry Technologies.
www.gehrytechnologies.com
www.sheetd.com

Coren Sharples is a founding partner of SHoP Architects and SHoP Construction Services. SHoP’s work has won numerous awards, has been published and exhibited globally, and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Current projects include several multifamily residential buildings in and around New York City, including the LEED’s certified Garden Street Lofts in Hoboken, New Jersey; the East River Waterfront Park in Lower Manhattan; and a new campus for Google in Mountain View, California. She holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Maryland’s College of Business and Social Science (1987), and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
www.shoparc.com

Marble Fairbanks is an architecture, design, and research office founded in 1990 by Scott Marble and Karen Fairbanks. Over the past years, Marble Fairbanks has received many local, national, and international design awards including an Art Commission of New York City Award for Excellence in Design, AIA awards, American Architecture Awards, a PA Award, an ID Award, and an ar+d Award for Emerging Architecture from Architecture Review magazine. In 2004 Scott Marble and Karen Fairbanks were the Charles and Ray Eames Lecturers at the University of Michigan, and the book Marble Fairbanks:Bootstrapping, was published on the occasion of that lecture.  Scott Marble teaches at the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University where he directs the Avery Digital Fabrication Research Lab.
www.marblefairbanks.com

Organized by The Architectural League; co-sponsored by Urban Center Books.

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Eric Firley
With a response by Alex de Looz

Eric Firley will discuss his recent research for the book The Urban Housing Handbook (Wiley, 2009), co-authored with Caroline Stahl.  Exploring the relationship between architecture and the urban fabric, the handbook provides graphic representations and analysis of 30 urban case studies from around the world.  These range from the London town house to apartments in Chicago and New York, taking in other European, South American, North African, and Asian examples.  In each chapter, a housing type is fully explored through a traditional case study and a more modern example that demonstrates how it as been reinterpreted in a contemporary context.

Eric Firley is an architect and urban designer, currently based in Paris.  After studying in Lausanne, Weimar, and London, he worked in several practices and design consultancies in France and the UK.  Having initiated this project in 2005, he has spent over two years writing and researching it, traveling extensively in the process.

Alex de Looz has been a project architect at MESH architectures since 2005, focusing on residential renovations across a wide spectrum of housing types.  He is also an editor and writer for both the academic and popular design press including Yale Constructs, ArtInfo, 306090, and PINUP magazines.  While in graduate school at Columbia University, de Looz with Corey Hoelker, researched, curated, and designed the exhibition: “Housing the City: Strategies for Multiple Dwellings in New York, 1830-2003.”  Upon graduation, the team undertook a study of the loft as an emerging real estate prototype in Asian markets, focusing on Beijing and Tokyo. de Looz holds a M.Arch from Columbia University and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Yale University.

Organized by The Architectural League; co-sponsored by Urban Center Books.


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.

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This program was part of the 2008-09 program calendar. Click here for information about our current season.

Recognized as the founder of contemporary architecture criticism, Ada Louise Huxtable was the first architecture critic for The New York Times, assuming the post in 1963. Winner of the first Pulitzer Prize for criticism as well as MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, she currently writes for the Wall Street Journal. In addition to her newspaper work, Huxtable’s eloquent and penetrating writing has appeared in numerous books, including The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion, Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?, Kicked a Building Lately?, Architecture, Anyone?, and Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life. Huxtable has served on the juries of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and the American Committee of the Japanese Praemium Imperiale.

In recognition of her new collection of criticism, On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change, Ms. Huxtable and MAS President Emeritus Kent Barwick will discuss the history and future of architecture and urban planning in New York. A reception will follow.

This is a members-only event; tickets are $25. AIA and New York State continuing education credits are available.

This program is co-sponsored by the Municipal Art Society.

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