Fellowships and Residencies for Architects and Designers
Thursday, January 14, 2010
7:00 p.m.
The Architectural League
594 Broadway, Suite 607
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Representatives and recent fellowship winners from the American Academy in Rome, the Design Trust for Public Space, and the MacDowell Colony, will discuss opportunities for fellowships and residencies for architects and designers. Information will also be available about the Architectural League’s Deborah J. Norden Fund and Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers.

Shawn Miller, program director of the American Academy in Rome will discuss the Rome prize, residential fellowships for emerging artists and scholars in Rome. Recent fellow, John Hartmann, principal of FREECELL, will discuss his recent work, including his sketchbooks from his time in Rome.

Deborah Marton, executive director of The Design Trust for Public Space, will discuss its fellowship awards to professionals whose work complements the Design Trust’s current program needs. Past fellows, Colin Cathcart of Kiss + Cathcart Architects (fellowship: “Long Island City: Connecting the Arts”) and Steven Caputo (fellowships: “High Performance Infrastructure Guidelines” and “Park Design for the 21st Century”), will discuss their fellowship projects and experiences at the Design Trust.

Cheryl Young, executive director of the MacDowell Colony will present the Colony’s residency opportunities. The residencies provide artists with time and space in which to create lasting works of the imagination at the Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Current fellow Jason Van Nest of H3 will present his ongoing research on the changing ideas of beauty in western history and the related parametric design program he worked on at MacDowell.

Admission is free and open to all. RSVP at rsvp@archleague.org.

Images from top to bottom: Rendering (c) 2009 Mobilis in Mobil; Sketch courtesy of John Hartmann.

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.

Representatives from the American Academy in Rome, the American Institute of Architects, the Deborah J. Norden Fund, the Design Trust for Public Space, the MacDowell Colony, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Van Alen Institute will discuss opportunities for individual grants and fellowships for architects and designers.

The American Academy in Rome offers the Rome prize, residential fellowships for emerging artists and scholars in Rome.
www.aarome.org

The American Institute of Architects New York Chapter offers numerous grants and scholarships supporting education, research, and travel.
www.aiany.org

The Deborah J. Norden Fund awards travel and study grants for recent graduates in the fields of architecture, architectural history, and urban studies.
www.archleague.org

The Design Trust for Public Space awards fellowships to professionals whose work will complement the Design Trust’s current program needs.
www.designtrust.org

The MacDowell Colony offers residencies of up to eight weeks providing artists with time and space in which to create lasting works of the imagination at the Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
www.macdowellcolony.org

The New York Foundation for the Arts offers unrestricted grants to artists living and working in the state of New York.
www.nyfa.org

The New York State Council on the Arts supports innovative projects by professionals (or teams of professionals) in the design and planning fields that advance the fields and contribute to the public’s understanding of the built environment.
www.nysca.org

The Van Alen Institute New York Prize Fellowship provides international emerging practitioners and scholars an opportunity for in-depth research and a platform for interventions in the public realm. Fellows are based at Van Alen Institute and generate projects on the most significant issues shaping contemporary discourses in architecture and public space.
www.vanalen.org

Admission is free and open to all.  Reservations are not accepted.

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.

Travel Reports from the Deborah J. Norden Fund
Gregory Wessner, Editor
5″ x 5″, sixteen color pamphlets with a z-fold slipcase
$19.95

The Deborah J. Norden Fund of the Architectural League awards travel/study grants to students and recent graduates in the fields of architecture, architectural history, and urban studies. This unique publication, designed by MY Studio, celebrates the first ten years of Norden Fund grants, which have supported travel to sixteen countries on five continents, from the barrios marginales of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to the Cistercian monasteries of southern France and the rammed earth skyscrapers of the Wadi Hadhramaout, Yemen. Each grant is documented in its own pamphlet through sketches, photographs and essays, all of which are collected in a z-fold slipcase.

To order, click here.

The Architecture, Planning and Design Program of the New York State Council on the Arts awards project grants for professionals in the design, planning, and historic preservation fields through its Independent Projects Category. Individuals must apply through a nonprofit sponsor. The Architectural League welcomes anyone interested to apply through the League.

Grants of up to $10,000 will be available for architects, landscape architects, planners, designers, historic preservationists, and scholars to realize specific projects that advance the field and contribute to the public’s understanding of the designed environment. The development of design prototypes, historical studies of building types, theoretical design studies or texts, or explorations of new technology in the design fields are all welcome. The program is particularly interested in innovative ideas being explored outside of traditional practice. Individuals whose work is not broadly known are encouraged to apply.

Projects may relate to any of the disciplines the program covers, including: architecture; architectural history; landscape architecture; urban and rural planning; urban design; historic preservation; graphic design; and industrial design.

Only New York State residents are eligible to apply. Tuition or projects being done in pursuit of an academic degree will not be funded. NYSCA funds cannot be used for out-of-state travel expenses. Applicants may only submit a project through a nonprofit sponsoring organization.

For more information on League sponsorship of NYSCA Independent Projects Grants, email Anne Rieselbach at rieselbach@archleague.org. The deadline for 2010 grants will not be until winter 2010.

For further information about this funding opportunity and application instructions, see the Architecture, Planning and Design Program’s guidelines for the Independent Projects Category on the New York State Council on the Arts’ website, www.nysca.org.