THE ARCHIVE

The final saga in the five-year architecture program at Cornell is an independent design thesis. For the majority of our undergraduate lives, this looms far in the future and is conceived vaguely as a ritual act performed by the most mature members of the architecture cult. Then, the moment arrives when you too must prepare for this rite of passage and become one of the deranged and sleep-deprived creatures known collectively by the younger generation in Rand as “those thesis students.”

In the spirit of Cornell, we tend to place a lot of pressure on ourselves when considering the thesis – hoping that it will be a shinning culmination of our extended tenure in Ithaca, but worrying that it might fall short. At his birthday party a few weeks ago, I told Richard Meier that we’ve been staying up at night with thesis nightmares and he responded humorously “who doesn’t have those?” Apparently, he continues to suffer from the same anxiety fifty years after his own undergraduate thesis at Cornell.

Today, we put aside anxiety and took our first official step in the thesis process by submitting posters for public display in Sibley Hall. Using a combination of text and visual material, these announce our intentions to professors in Ithaca and help us solicit advisors for the upcoming spring semester. The deadline caused a fury of activity throughout the week and a number of late nights, but forced us to solidify our ideas into a single, compelling proposal.

I have chosen to pursue an interest in destruction and intend to claim this process within the realm of design. Although slightly morose, I think the theme raises a number of interesting questions regarding the life-cycle of buildings that production-driven architects tend to neglect.

My site is on the southeast periphery of Rome along the New Appian Way and I am proposing to redesign an auto-demolition facility that caught on fire there last summer. If you’re curious, here is the first paragraph of my thesis statement:

In the summer heat of 2009, hundreds of discarded cars along the new Appian Way caught on fire, sending plumes of smoke into the skies above Rome. The pyre of automotive waste frightened residents throughout the capital city and called attention to a striking discontinuity in the historic and increasingly populated landscape of Rome’s periphery. The flames marked the site of an existing auto-demolition facility, where the traces of consumer culture have been awkwardly lodged between the expansive park of the ancient Appian Way and a developing residential district. Within this context of permanence and growth, how can architecture accommodate volatility and destruction? How might the internal metabolism of waste positively contribute to the life and economy of the Eternal City? READ MORE >>

With poster and proposal complete, the real work is about to begin. Before next semester, I hope to assemble a thesis committee that draws expertise from a variety of different disciplines. So far, I have enlisted a Roman architectural historian who has provided me with some fascinating information about the funerary monuments that once lined the ancient Appian Way. Now I am looking for people with expertise in material properties,  the (de) manufacturing process, and the automobile. Let me know if you have any ideas!

The Cornell architecture students in New York recently discovered the Myers-Briggs personality test and have been consuming the descriptions of “personality type” like scientific fortune cookies. The classification system assesses an individual on the basis of four categories that, when combined, describe 16 unique personalities. We each took a brief online questionnaire and found how our cognitive functions align with the following dichotomies:

• Extraversion vs. Introversion
• Sensing vs. iNtuition
• Thinking vs. Feeling
• Judging vs. Perceiving

Myers-Briggs defines each of these terms in a particular way that might differ slightly from their normal connotation. According to the theory, each person has a preference for one quality over the other similar to right or left handedness. Preferences are innate or developed and can be slightly expressed, or dramatically so. In sum, they gauge how individuals perceive their environment, interact with others, and make decisions.

My friends have a variety of personality types, but I noticed a strong preference for intuition over sensing (described by the letter “N”). This category differentiates between people who draw information from their five senses (focusing on the present) and those who see patterns and possibilities in the information they receive (focusing on the future). Architects benefit from both qualities, but it appears that we at Cornell are disproportionately inclined toward the later.

My personality type is ENTP with strongly expressed “iNtuition” and “Thinking” and weakly expressed “Extraversion” and “Perceiving”. Apparently I share this personality with Walt Disney, Julia Child, Steven Spielberg, and Julius Caesar. Try to make sense of that! It sounds like I’m destined to lead an autocratic cooking show.

The descriptions of each personality can only go so far but these tend to be more accurate than the placemats at Chinese restaurants. You might be surprised how much you can learn about yourself by taking one of these tests. The theory and terms presented by Myers-Briggs also provide a good point of reference when considering group dynamics and decision-making. Thus, it’s an invaluable resource for architects who spend the majority of their careers working with teams.

I scoured the internet to see what various researchers could tell me about my personality and found some amusing relationship advice. My natural partner is an INFJ or INTJ. So, if you’re a twenty-something girl reading this and want to talk about the future… I might be your type.

Kandinsky at the Guggenheim.

Take a spin in Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous museum! The Kandinsky exhibition will run through January 13th.

I learned very early on that donations to homeless people do them little good. Throughout the United States, and especially in wealthy cities like New York, the handouts given by kind individuals to ease the suffering of the less fortunate do precisely the opposite. They offer an incentive for homeless to remain on the streets rather than seeking help at a shelter, and they perpetuate harmful addictions. It has been said many times that the money flowing into the cup often flows out as liquor.

I do not give money to the homeless. That has been my steadfast rule since arriving to the city two months ago. And so, as I pass through the streets and subways of New York each day, I look into the forlorn eyes of each washed-up soul with nothing to offer them. I consistently reject the warm feeling of charity that a handout would buy me and remain strictly rational – knowing that my spare change can do more good in other hands.

While riding the subway late the other night, a woman walked onto my car and delivered yet another plea for help. But this time it was different. She dropped to her knees and spoke in a manner that resonated deep within me; it was impossible to ignore her. “I am starving” she said in a deep voice that shook her frame and mine. She choked on the words as she repeated them: “I am starving. Please. Please help me.”

I didn’t want to give her money, but another idea crossed my mind. Earlier that evening, we had an event at the Cornell studio and – like any normal college student — I had harvested as many left-overs as possible to eat during the coming week. As the homeless women waited for donations on her knees, I rooted through my backpack and found a large bag of vegetables. I offered this to her and she accepted them appreciatively.

The train stopped and we both stepped off onto an empty platform. I walked ahead with the pleasant feeling that I had helped someone in need. But the woman fascinated me and I glanced back at her from the top of the stairs. She paced back and forth on the platform and the bag of food I had given her was nowhere to be seen. Then, upon further inspection, I saw it discarded at the side of the tracks.

Furious and confused, I marched back down the stairs and approached the woman on the platform where she stood alone. “Excuse me ma’am” I said in a quivering but relatively forceful tone, “you told me that you were starving and I offered you my food. Why did you throw it away?”

“I don’t eat that stuff” she replied.

“What do you mean you don’t eat that stuff? What do you eat?

“Burgers, and chips, and things” she said as if I should have known.

I stood in shock. I always believed “starving” to be a severe condition that inspired the desire to eat food – any type of food. This is certainly the case in other countries around the world, but not so in the United States where notions of starvation have been utterly distorted, and the poor struggle with other problems.

I couldn’t insist that she take my food or eat anything besides ground beef, but she had claimed to be starving and I wanted to know more about the situation. With hardly any pressure, she began to explain her life story in great detail to me. She had been “spoiled” by a mother and grandmother who never made her work. After their deaths, she couldn’t provide for herself and landed on the streets. She moved in and out of shelters but got into fights with other residents there. She tried handing out papers for the NY Post but couldn’t pull herself together every morning to do the job. Now she rides the subways back and forth, trying to earn enough cash to pay a friend for a place to sleep and wash up.

After this narrative, I looked at her and told her that she was the best-spoken homeless person I had ever met (better spoken than some Cornell students for that matter). Why remain on the streets in such a miserable cycle of desperation? I didn’t want to patronize her or project my own values onto someone I barely knew, so I asked the simplest question that came to mind. “Do you want to be here in two years?”

“No,” obviously. But she couldn’t imagine an alternative; she seemed bound by immediate needs and immediate desires. “I’m gonna ride the train tonight until I make $15” she told me, “then I’m gonna put my head down for a bit, wake up, eat an egg sandwich, and do it all over again.”

Eat an egg sandwich? I asked myself (this time exercising enough restraint to maintain an inner dialogue). Egg sandwiches are expensive. I don’t eat egg sandwiches. Who eats egg sandwiches?

The idea of food frustrated me as I looked at the bag of discarded vegetables in the distance. “Look” I finally said, “you’ve got a tough life and I respect your struggle, but you’ve got to take what you can get. That’s what people do to get by on this earth. If you get a few bucks – or even a bit of food – you’ve got to make the most of it.” She shook her head in agreement but her glazed eyes gave herself away. She didn’t know how to make the most of anything. She was good at making money on subway cars, so she did that. She liked the taste of fast food, so she did that too.

The #4 train arrived and she stepped aboard. I climbed out of the station with more emotions than I can describe, but one distinct realization: it’s hard to help people who don’t know how to help themselves; and it’s probably naive of us to think that we can.

Living in New York City gives you the impression of being at the center of the universe and, although Copernicus may have proven otherwise, many New Yorkers believe the world revolves around them. Culturally speaking, this conclusion is surprisingly difficult to refute. Here, the rich and famous walk unannounced through the streets among corporate headquarters, trend-setting boutiques, and elite institutions. It is a strange and wonderful place. The local baseball team just won its 27^th World Series title for God’s sake!

The city may be narcissistic, but I will discuss that in a different post.  Right now I want to address something that bothers me every morning as I take the subway to class.  New Yorkers – consciously or not – have constructed an identity for themselves that departs significantly from reality; they completely deny the existence of New Jersey.

I could provide several oral accounts of this phenomenon, but I think the MTA Subway maps show NYC’s state-of-denial in its most basic form. Through a subtle distortion of geography, the transportation authority is convincing people that (a) the Hudson is much wider than it actually is, and that (b) Staten Island floats somewhere quietly in the Atlantic Ocean. Don’t be fooled by these claims; look at the maps yourself.

It turns out that the Hudson is, at points, only slightly wider than the East River. So, if it weren’t for a lopsided distribution of transit routes, Jersey would be as much a part of New York City as Brooklyn. And while Staten Island can call itself one of the five boroughs, its only delineation from New Jersey’s land mass is a narrow body of brackish water.

Many New Yorkers dislike New Jersey and poke fun at it incessantly. They deride it as the “Garbage State” and call attention to its landfills, turnpikes, and communities that identify themselves according to exit number. The busy highways and industrial vistas that lead to and from Manhattan reinforce this negative stereotype — giving people an exaggerated impression of the messy sprawl that sometimes characterizes the Garden State

This, however, does not justify the calculated elimination of New Jersey from people’s cognitive map. The geographical trickery needs to stop and New Yorkers need to admit the existence — and proximity — of their closest neighbor. Next time you ride the subway in New York, take a look at the map and ask yourself…

Italy may be known primarily for pizza and pasta, but its culinary expertise extends far beyond fine-grain foods.  Two summers ago, my friend Annie set out on a two-month mission to collect regional recipes with the flavors of Italy, but without the gluten.  The best of these have recently been published in her cookbook “Olio, Aglio.”

Here’s an explanation from Annie:

“Olio Aglio, translated means literally “oil, garlic”. It is an Italian cookbook created specifically for Celiacs and those following a gluten free diet. … The recipes are split into four categories based on the four regions: Trentino-Alto Adige is full of hearty meals, Tuscany has many fresh oil and wine based recipes, Puglia has the seafood, and Sicily wraps it together with delicious desserts.”

Copies of Olio Aglio are available online from AuthorHouse books. Click here to order yourself a copy directly from the publisher. Also, check out Annie’s blog “Silly What?” for more information and sample recipes.

Saturday morning, those of us studying history with Mary Woods wrestled ourselves out of bed and headed downtown to the Staten Island Ferry. On the other side — after a free ride past Governors Island and the Statue of Liberty — we climbed aboard a Park Service bus and headed toward Freshkills Park.

The weekend excursion followed in the footsteps of Gordon Matta-Clark, who gained fame in the 1970’s for artistic mischief in the outer boroughs. Like all of us, Matta-Clark studied architecture at Cornell, but he rejected the discipline and launched himself into the New York art scene with works that he dubbed “anarchitecture”. These exposed the volatility of the city (and its structures) through building cuts, social and culinary experiments, and other acts of creative recklessness.

With irony and respect, our history of architecture class now honors Gordon Matta-Clark with the unofficial course title, “What Would Gordon Do?” Besides obviously referencing Jesus Christ, this title captures the essence of our course. Throughout the semester, we look at a series of neighborhoods in New York through the historical and theoretical lens of Matta-Clark. His life and work pervade the city and provide a launching point for discussion and debate. What would Gordon do if he were presented with the largely gentrified city that exists today? Do the changes over the past thirty years represent progress? Where do opportunities for intervention still exist?

The weekend field trip to Staten Island provoked all of these questions.  The bus took us to Fresh Kills landfill to explore a site that gained fame as the world’s largest trash heap. In 1972, Gordon Matta-Clark visited this same site under much different circumstances and produced a video documenting the mountains of residential waste, the machinery that moved them, and the seagulls that feasted on the decay. (click the image to play film)

In 2001 the landfill officially closed and became New York City’s second largest park – three times the size of Central Park. The landscape firm Field Operations developed a site strategy and the land will be incrementally re-purposed over the next 30-years. Although the park remains closed to the public, there are many opportunities to visit with members of the park service, who lead weekly informational and bird-watching tours. More information is available on the park service’s website.

The site today is strikingly clean with four man-made hills covered in long grass.  One might not think twice about the rolling landscape if it weren’t for the occasional metal well-heads that vent gas from the decomposing rubble underneath. These, however, cause little disruption to the sprawling views and reflect the cool austerity of much larger infrastructural fragments below. Gordon Matta-Clark may not have envisioned a park here, but the idea now seems well within reach.

Images of a landfill: past, present, future.

Rarely do I rub elbows with world-famous architects, but this Friday night I found myself chatting alongside Richard Meier at Cornell’s studio in Chelsea. As strange as it may seem, the encounter didn’t involve a lecture or design review. It involved cake.

The evening festivities were organized to celebrate Richard Meier’s 75^th birthday. Dean Kleinman hatched the idea a few weeks ago as a friendly gesture to Meier (who serves on the Dean’s council) and as a fun occasion for students in the NYC program to meet one of Cornell’s more prolific architecture alums. In preparation, students designed an interactive birthday card (above) in Meier’s own style and decorated (ahem, cleaned) the studio space to avoid offending the well-known king of clean.

After a brutal week of mid-term reviews and presentations, we welcomed the opportunity to unwind with a bit of free food and drink. And although none of us had much experience throwing birthday parties for celebrities, everything went quite smoothly. Feelings of trepidation were overcome and Richard (with whom I now consider to be on a first name basis) proved to be friendly, gracious, and surprisingly easy-going.

Upon his arrival, he congratulated us on attending the #1 architecture school in the world and suggested with a smile that we might even be the best architecture students. We laughed – awkwardly — to avoid any misplaced vanity that his comment might have provoked. After the ice-breaker and a few words from the organizers, the evening proceeded informally with ample quantities of food, song, and conversation.

After conducting a proper survey of the buffet table, I landed myself in front of Richard Meier and tossed him my first piece of conversational bait. He eagerly spoke about the Ara Pacis museum in Rome and the adjacent (and neglected) Mausoleum of Augustus. This led to a conversation about Cornell’s Rome program and the comparative merits of that versus “AAP in NYC”.

Along with newly appointed chair of architecture Dagmar Richter, we engaged in an interesting discussion about the future of architecture courses and coops in New York City. Meier offered plenty of advice and we brainstormed various ways that the program might be improved or expanded in the coming years.

As the evening wore on, Richard Meier and the other mature folk parted ways, leaving us with left-overs to eat, a sound system to pump, and projectors on which to play an assortment of youtube videos. It goes without saying that an impromptu dance party commenced. My only regret? That Richard Meier never showed us his moves.

Frida Kahlo & Wolverine: home-grown unibrow, hand-made claws.