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Art and design publications devalue the essential work of writing. Low pay rates and flat-fee payments amount to freelance writers generously subsidizing publishers, who in the worst cases compensate writers less than a minimum wage for work. Art and design writers demand pay rate increases and improved editorial practices that compensate them for all of the time required to produce content for well-established publications.

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Current industry standards are unsustainable and punitive for writers. The lack of consideration shown for working hours, last-minute requests, additional services with no additional pay, lack of timely payments of contracts, invoices, and fees, and lack of responses to pitches all amount to abusive practices.

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We acknowledge the pressure that’s been put on publications over the last 15 years from lost advertising to the internet. But without writers, there’s no magazine. The response to pushback from writers about uncompensated labor cannot be to cut off assignments. As an industry, we are obliged to figure out a business model that doesn’t systematically exploit people.

Full text at commonedge.org @commonedgecollab
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Check it out in @archpaper a review of @art_omi ‘s Shared Space—Collective Practices curated by Julia van den Hout @jvandenhout featuring @fundamentaldesignbuild @colloqate @wip_collaborative & @assembleofficial

Full story at archpaper.com

The four collaboratives share a style familiar to many community-oriented design initiatives: ad hoc, colorful, joyful, and often temporary, they react to the unique situation of a place and engender a sense of belonging among residents normally ignored by government programs and private finance-led redevelopment. They create places of identification and inspiration that signal intangible, unseen possibilities. While the scale of these projects can often seem inadequate in the face of larger-scale systemic and institutional failures, the work has a self-evident value. They serve as pilots, models, examples, and inspirations, change agents stimulating others to act, and opportunities to expand the imagination for people with little exposure to art and design. They can have substantial results when adequately funded and expanded into policymaking regimes. And the collaborations with community members can be incredibly fun, meaningful, and rewarding.

Thanks so much to the generous assignment and story editing of @yhprumkcaj & @emilyconklin !
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#Writersstrike
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We need to get @ericklottary into tennis! The grunting in this sport requires his artistry.
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New story in Oculus @centerforarch about new public school construction and expansion in New York City.

Get this…

Currently, the New York City School Construction Authority anticipates needing more than 6,200 new seats in Queens high schools alone by 2026. Its budget, fortunately, is appropriately enormous: $2.13 billion for 29 extensions and new buildings in Queens, adding more than 18,000 seats, and $19.4 billion to manage the herculean task of building and maintaining schools citywide from 2020 to 2024.

Thus, on a busy section of Northern Boulevard at the crossroads of Woodside, Astoria, Sunnyside Gardens, and Jackson Heights, between the Home Depot and a row of car dealerships, a new $178.85 million high school designed and built by SCA’s in-house staff of 170 architects and engineers is expected to serve more than 3,079 teenagers.

Full story at link in profile.

Featuring @rktbarchitects

Thanks editor @jkrichels !!
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Another cool daylighting of a river in @archpaper by @landcollective with pavilions by @hwkn_architecture/ photos by Alan Karchmer

Full story at archpaper.com

Above the start of Grassy Branch of Cool Creek in the small city of Westfield, Indiana, a wooden boardwalk snakes through a renaturalized streambed where pedestrians can hop over the stream or get their feet wet in the flowing water. Nearby, the new park, the Grand Junction Park & Plaza, accommodates dedicated spaces for open-air performances; a glass-walled cafe with a cascading, stepped Indiana limestone facade; and a Great Lawn for lounging. Park users can picnic and play, ice-skate in the winter, or enjoy the many comfortable wooden benches from which they can peacefully observe the resurgence of wildlife.

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The park, which officially opened last year, was designed by David Rubin of Land Collective with architecture by Matthias Hollwich of HWKN in collaboration with RATIO Architects and signage and wayfinding by Bruce Mau Design, along with an extended team of civil engineers and riparian-corridor specialists. While the end result is impressive, the effort began as a more limited project focused on flood control.

Thanks editor @yhprumkcaj !!
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Tennis is a proxy for reflections on desire, reality, nirvana, suffering, transcendence… via Slavoj Zizek.
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Amazing project in @archpaper instigated by @dallasnews architecture critic @marklamster designed by @stosslu & @mpdlstudio

Full story at archpaper.com

“Dealey Plaza became a place of shame and embarrassment for Dallas’s elected officials, who tried to ignore it, placing only an informational plaque at the site until, in 1970, the city commissioned Philip Johnson to design a memorial several blocks away. The unfortunate result is a grim, Brutalist artifact.

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In the meantime, Dealey Plaza attracted hucksters and conspiracy theorists, who regularly marked the locations where bullets were found with spray-painted x’s on the pavement. Rather than taking the situation as an excuse for grandstanding and the reprimand of city leaders, Mark Lamster, architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News, decried the sad state of this part of downtown. “It is a deplorable state of affairs,” he wrote last October, “but also a great opportunity; a chance to transform this site into a space of civic memory and understanding that embraces the past and points to the future.”

Through his leadership, Dallas Morning News has commissioned an extraordinary vision for Dealey Plaza. Led by Chris Reed of Stoss Landscape Urbanism and Monica Ponce de Leon of MPdL Studio, the effort is an inspiring example of what architecture criticism and public memorials can and should be. The Reinventing Dealey Plaza project layers transportation infrastructure, historic preservation, ecological design, and two memorials to shocking incidents of political violence within a generous transformation of one of Dallas’s most significant and neglected public spaces.”

Thanks editor @yhprumkcaj for fantastic assignment!
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Check out a beautiful Paris renovation across from Père Lachaise by @ateliervarenne in @dwellmagazine Photos by @isabelamayerphoto

Thinking of my cinquième arrondissement people after yesterday’s building explosion. 😢❤️❤️

Paris apartments with open views are hard to come by, so when Pierre Vérité and Allira Swick found one with three rooms of south-facing windows overlooking the verdant landscape of Père Lachaise cemetery, what also serves as the city’s largest green space, they knew they’d found something special. And there was more to love: antique chandeliers, plaster medallions, and wood paneling. Yet the apartment had not been updated since 1963 by its most recent inhabitant, a woman in her 90s. Pierre and Allira wanted to preserve some of its antique charms while making it their own.

Interior architect Asma Florençon moved the primary bedroom to the opposite end of the plan, turning the space into a living room and widening the doorway between it and the dining room with a segmental arch, which became a motif for the renovation. It’s a common element in Paris, Florençon points out. "I think of it as a return to origins," she says.
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Fort Tilden, Rockaways
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In @archpaper read a review of the Curatorial Research Collective and @cassimshepard Mass Support show @whatsonatssa

A uniquely American mania has taken hold in the area of housing reform. For the last few years, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and regional newspapers across the U.S., along with architects, planners, and real estate experts, have proffered the misguided idea that reformation or elimination of zoning would allow the free market to somehow produce an adequate supply of affordably priced dwellings. According to the going logic, if regulations were eased, real estate developers and homebuilders would flood the market with inexpensive units that they would sell at below market rates for mysterious reasons and then donate their potential profits for the benefit of society. Advocates also mistakenly believe that bankers would willfully loan money for this cause at subprime interest rates and, presumably, excuse developers who sell units at less than their offering plan.

Zoning-reform activists may not have been paying attention in 2008 during the subprime mortgage–backed securities crisis. The federal government opted to shore up the banks and allow them to take away the homes of hundreds of thousands of families rather than sacrifice the difference between their declining market value and mortgages. The same thing happened recently, when three banks collapsed in the second-largest incident in American history. The ideology of regulators is to protect bankers, who have no interest in giving away potential profits. No one is giving a break to buyers unless forced to do so. Given this trajectory, the idea that zoning reform by itself, without other regulatory mandates, will have more than a marginal effect on the price of housing is madness. The free market will not save us.

What are other solutions for the perennial question of housing? The exhibition Mass Support, which was on view at City College’s Spitzer School of Architecture, injects a world of other possibilities into this impoverished imagination of market-based housing policymaking.

Read the full review archpaper.com

Thanks editor @yhprumkcaj !
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Join a discussion at a White Box @whiteboxny today, Saturday May 27th at 4 pm about Taller Boricua @tallerboricua curated by @yohannamroa

Taller Boricua emerged in East Harlem within the cultural landscape of New York City in 1969, alongside the artistic effervescence that took place Downtown, particularly in SoHo, Tribeca, and the Lower East Side. Their objective was to activate, through art, processes of social resistance in frequently neglected, underserved communities. From the beginning, they have been part of the Nuyorican movement that originated in the late 1960s in neighborhoods like Loisaida, Williamsburg, and East Harlem aka El Barrio; visual artists, writers, especially poets, and musicians, converged in El Taller (The Workshop), where prints, Spoken Word and Salsa developed within the environment of Latin American culture, today deeply rooted in New York.

El Taller Boricua (The Boricua Puerto Rican Workshop), From the Art Workers Coalition to the Present, is the first exhibition of in the “New York Artscapes”, in which WhiteBox is creating a platform to welcome and make visible cultural processes that have fundamentally constituted the cultural landscape of this city while and are dwelling outside the hegemonic discourse, due to to the condition of race, gender, and/or social class. The show presents a panoramic view of the 50-year history of the Workshop, which reveals the volume and complexity of their artistic production directly linked to the social and historical problems of the context. It is an ongoing archival exhibition because it is understandable that after 50 years of uninterrupted work, their work methodologies have been transformed along with their own life stories. Thus, our pondering over New York City’s storied past is quite different now than in 1969.
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The Michael Sorkin Reading Room at City College @whatsonatssa is a wonderful place honoring Sorkin’s writing and thinking, and a great resource for researchers. Read the full story in the Architect’s Newspaper. @archpaper

Had he survived, the pandemic would be the type of crisis about which Sorkin would have much to say. Given the spatial, economic, and political dimensions of the crisis, which continues to impact us today, the milieu would have become material for a compelling argument about how to better organize social and political space.

The library embodies the thick history of this form of thinking. Elisabetta Terragni painstakingly documented the arrangement of the books in the studio to preserve their order. The shelves are stocked with an extensive collection of titles under headings like Utopia, Green Cities, Suburbia, Green Eco-Ecology, Globalism/Imperialism, and an international array of regional urbanisms. Terragni will eventually fully restore the studio’s books in the order Sorkin left them.

“I knew Michael very well in his work, but to go through all the books helped me to understand how these books were the tools for him to write and to think,” Terragni told AN. “If you flip through any of the books, you can find notes, letters. The work I did is just the beginning. Now they’re there to open up for research and studies, because there are a lot of clichés about Michael. He was a talented writer, he was an agitator, he was all of these things, but it’s high time to go deeper and to start to talk seriously about his work.”

Full story at the link.

Thanks so much editor Jack Murphy! @yhprumkcaj

https://www.archpaper.com/2023/05/the-spitzer-school-architecture-preserves-library-michael-sorkin-studio-terreform-urban-research-sorkin-reading-room/
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Love supporting this issue of @archpaper with some secret behind the scenes editorial work.

Thanks @yhprumkcaj & @mmattshaw

#misappropriatinginiko
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New story in the May/ June issue of @dwellmagazine on @nathanfellarchitecture ‘s Moiré Noir, a sly porch addition in New Orleans a block from St. Charles Avenue that hides a gabled roof the client Eric Roland couldn’t stand with a black wooden screen and adds interior square footage by putting the stairs outside. “I like clean lines,“ Roland says. “I don’t like anything circular. I even hated the gable roof.” Thanks editor @mike.chino !
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Love this story in @archpaper about the retrofit of La Mama's @lamamaetc original theater building by Beyer Blinder Belle @beyerblinderbelle . It recounts how in 1967 La Mama founder Ellen Stewart stumbled onto the structure as decrepit ruin, first built by a German professional music society in 1873, and adapted it into a theater, which led to E. 4th Street becoming the Fourth Arts Block, the city's first naturally occurring cultural district, oriented around theater production.

The $24 million renovation maintains a close spiritual connection to the intentions of La MaMa founder Ellen Stewart, the African American Saks Fifth Avenue porter-turned-fashion designer-turned-theater impresario, dearly departed in 2011, who rented a basement theater on East 9th Street in 1961 to create a venue for her brother, playwright Frederick Lights. Stewart stumbled onto the 4th Street building looking for expanded performance space in 1967, guided by her intuitive feeling about people and places—what she called her “beeps.”

“That’s how she programmed shows,” Mary Fulham, managing director of La MaMa, told AN. “If she met you and she felt her beeps, she would give you a show. She was totally intuitive in that way. It was about the artist. Who are you? Do you need the space? What do you want to do? If it resonated with her, she called it her beeps.”

Full story online at https://www.archpaper.com/2023/04/beyer-blinder-belle-builds-contemporary-theater-behind-historic-facade-la-mama-experimental-theatre-club/

Thanks editor @yhprumkcaj Jack Murphy !!

Thank you publicist @shellydilello @blue_medium
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Here's a cute Indian house published in @dwellmagazine this time in south Bangalore. The architect is @taliesyn_design , a Bangalore office named after Frank Lloyd Wright's estate. Very sustainable (apart from the concrete) in terms of energy consumption and materials with a mixture of vernacular, modern, and custom elements, and a sweet family story. Dwell+ full story open to subscribers only.

Chandrashekar oriented the entire composition to optimize passive energy and natural ventilation: There is no air conditioning. An elegant row of opaque clerestory windows bring in muted light beneath the roof overhang. All of the building services and appliances run on electricity, and rooftop solar panels reduce reliance on the grid to an absolute minimum.

"We wanted to give the whole home a minimalistic feel, yet the idea was to add in some nostalgia," Parinita says. "It’s simple and it’s modern—but it vibes with the nostalgia that we all grew up with."

https://www.dwell.com/article/cabin-house-taliesyn-design-and-architecture-bangalore-india-d32a9898

Thanks editor @mike.chino Mike Chino!

Photos by Aaron Chapman @byaaronchapman

Thanks @paavnivashist for coordinating!
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I stan this poetry writer Eva H.D. whose new collection The Natural Hustle is out now from McClelland & Stewart. Here Eva reads the famous Bonedog poem featured in the film I’m Thinking of Ending Things, one of the more seductive figurations of poetry into cinema.
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Have you experienced:

-Stagnant pay rates compared to inflation
-Flat fees below industry standards
-Abuse of kill fees
-Intellectual property theft
-Excessive revisions by rounds of editors
-Threats to cut off assignments for raising issues
-Offloading of staff work onto freelancers
-Extraordinarily late payments?

Let’s talk!

Association of Independent Art & Design Journalists

@arch_lobby_ny
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Stretching, breathing, strengthening
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Which art and design magazines have the most noxious editorial practices and unfair pay rates?

–Association of Independent Art & Design Journalists
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Full story on @bronxlandia project by @majoracarter & @studiov_arch in @archpaper at archpaper.com

Excerpt:

For the past two years, urban revitalization strategy consultant and community-based developer Majora Carter has been operating Bronxlandia as a site for temporary events in a decommissioned Cass Gilbert–designed Hunts Point train station. Within the remains of the 1908 French Renaissance New York, Westchester, and Boston Rail (NYW&B) line stop, the MacArthur Award–winning Bronx native and author of Reclaim Your Community has hosted everything from under-the-radar music concerts and book events to pro wrestling matches and TED talks. Now Carter is launching the venue’s next phase as a restored and updated landmark designed around its latest function as a South Bronx-focused performance space.

Thanks editor @yhprumkcaj !
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For @outland_art , a new online magazine of critical conversations about emerging digital technologies and their connections to contemporary art. A couple of things of particular interest in this story. One was the chance to research what the fuck people are talking about when they talk about the metaverse and why they think it's interesting. The other was the chance to talk extensively to @schumacher.patrik of @zahahadidarchitects and give him and his politics a fair reading. (The link is in my profile and at outland.art) Thanks editors @briandroitcour @gabrielle_tuesday_ and guest editor @sden023 !
Excerpt:
Metaverse architecture need not be limited by the physical constraints of real-life buildings. The previous era of modernism liberated itself from orthogonal forms by steel-reinforced concrete. Now, rules of gravity need not apply. Some of the design tropes of metaverses, such as the tendency toward depersonified bird’s-eye views and the absence of doors and windows, emerge from the peculiar characteristics of purely computational design. Yet Liberland Metaverse maintains the fiction of a virtual-reality horizon: gravity-bound worlds are more familiar to users and easier for them to navigate and identify themselves within. That may explain why its visual language resembles ZHA’s well-known commissions for high-end condos, hotels, and cultural institutions, favoring a curvy, blobby, parametric morphology driven by computer-aided design software and influenced by Russian constructivism and post-Corbusian architecture. For the sake of legibility, the site plans and layouts use recognizable filters of spatial division and threshold indications.

Schumacher has an acute sense of the possibilities and limitations of attempting another set of navigational and linguistic cues that would emerge from the new context—what he calls a semiology of the virtual world. “We can’t leap into a totally unfamiliar world where we’re not even bodies without a front, back, and an axis of orientation,” he told me.
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This piece on the cover of the winter issue of Oculus critiques the rhetoric of inclusivity as a framework for progressive reform, using David Gissen's questioning of form/deformation in the history of architecture as a central reference, borrowing from his e-flux essay "Disabling Form" and his new book The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access. Also reviewed are Snohetta's renovation of the privately owned public space at 550 Madison, SmithGroup's public toilets in San Francisco, WXY and Body Lawson's Peninsula development in the Bronx, and CannonDesign's 201 Ellicott in Buffalo. Also referenced, Interboro Partners' The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion.

The ideal of inclusive architecture implies an accessible, welcoming space for all. We imagine the architect acting as a mediator, deliberately eliminating barriers to entry, appealing to a myriad of potential users, and transforming narrow programs into coherent forms and encompassing visions. Yet we experience countless examples of the opposite: Designers hired by private clients to flaunt amenities that by definition most of us cannot access, armed with deterrences to exclude those who potential buyers may consider undesirable. Brooklyn-based Interboro Partners created a 440-page encyclopedia of such details, practices, and policies in its 2017 The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion, now in its second edition, which remains a salient expression of design at the threshold of belonging.

In David Gissen’s The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access, published this winter by University of Minnesota Press, he dreams of another way of designing. Instead of an approach that identifies specific groups, needs, and hindrances, ensuring inclusion or non-exclusion by complying with guidelines layered onto forms conceived without disability in mind, Gissen imagines an architecture that transcends an additive approach. Up to now, design in the modern tradition has emerged from metaphors and symbols shot through with notions of deformity. What if disability itself became a motif, a generative starting point?
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I used to think, wrongly, that I had talent. I believe this is a result of being favored as a kid and encouraged, unreasonably, to think I could excel at anything. Society undervalues technique compared to our ill-defined conception of talent and overemphasizes psychology as a reason for winning and losing. A few years ago, I set out to learn tennis technique to find out whether it would make a difference in my ability to win matches against players who had been beating me for years. I started writing something recently about what I learned.