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Architectural Record

‘Evicted’ Opens at the National Building Museum

On April 17, 2018

Eviction notices welcome visitors to an exhibition at the National Building Museum | © Deane Madsen

What happens when one’s home is taken away? That’s a question that far too many people have had to ask themselves when faced with eviction, and one that looms in “Evicted,” a new exhibition at Washington, D.C.’s National Building Museum.

“We now know from looking at 80 million eviction records from across the country that in 2016, 2.3 million people were touched by eviction,” says sociologist Matthew Desmond, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City serves as the prompt for the exhibition by the same title. “Evicted” tells the stories of those who have returned home to find all of their personal belongings stacked curbside—or, worse still, shrink-wrapped and carted away to a bonded storage warehouse. It shows the courtrooms where landlords appear with their lawyers, and former tenants often don’t show up, knowing that their failure to pay rent has decided their cases whether they appear or not. The exhibition maps eviction data, proving it to be not just a local or regional problem, but a nationwide epidemic that, as Desmond explains, is as much a cause of poverty as it is a result of it. “This is a problem that is affecting the streets of communities all across the country,” he says. “Through our work at the Eviction Lab, a Princeton University–based team that researches evictions in America], we’ve been able to see this, and take a problem that’s been invisible and bring it to light, and literally put it on the map.”

The map to which Desmond refers covers the first wall of the exhibition with moving boxes scaled according to the number of evictions per state, painting a tangible picture of just how widespread eviction has become in America. “You can see the weight of this problem at a national level that we were never able to before,” Desmond says. “For me, housing should be a right for everyone who lives in this country. It should be part of what it means to be an American, because without it, everything else falls apart.”

Read the full story at Architectural Record.

A visitor walks through “Evicted” at the National Building Museum | © Deane Madsen

Burning Man Exhibition Opens at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery

On April 2, 2018

by Deane

Sculptures by HYBYCOZO, the team of Yelena Filipchuk and Serge Beaulieu, fill a gallery within the Renwick with patterns of light and shadow. | © Deane Madsen

The Renwick Gallery hosts “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man,” through January 21, 2019. Below is excerpted a portion of an article for Architectural Record.

Over the next nine months, an artful taste of the Nevada desert experience that is Burning Man will occupy the Renwick Gallery and its surrounding neighborhood in the heart of Washington, D.C.’s Golden Triangle. In “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man,” the Renwick Gallery—which is the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s branch dedicated to contemporary craft—plays host to a wide variety of artworks ranging in complexity and scale from jewelry and clothing to oversized sculpture and a virtual reality walkthrough of what Burning Man attendees affectionately refer to as “the playa.”

Every year since 1986, Burning Man has set up a temporary city for a weeklong festival; since 1990, these have been held in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert (except in 1997, when it was held in the Hualapai Desert, a few miles northwest of Black Rock). These transient desert conclaves, hosting some 70,000 annual visitors, occupy pentagonal sites, with an arched plan that centers on the Burning Man—an anthropomorphic wooden sculpture that is burned at the conclusion of the event in keeping with a “leave no trace” ethos that serves as one of the festival’s 10 guiding principles—and a temple, which is likewise constructed of wood and subject to conflagration.

A visitor steps on a pad to activate Shrumen Lumen, a kinetic light sculpture by FoldHaus Art Collective in the No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man exhibition. | © Deane Madsen

“The idea that you create the world that you want to live in is something that we really ought to be talking about here in our nation’s capital,” says exhibition curator Nora Atkinson. She explains that the show pulls its title from another playa tenet: “No spectators” refers to the idea that all visitors should be fully involved, present, and active contributors to their experiences, as opposed to mere observers of them.

Read the full story at Architectural Record.

Sculptor David Best worked with a team of artists to install a Burning Man temple within the Renwick Gallery’s grand salon. | © Deane Madsen

‘Almost Home’ by Do Ho Suh Opens at Smithsonian American Art Museum

On March 17, 2018

by Deane

Installation view of Do Ho Suh: Almost Home at the Smithsonian American Art Museum | © Deane Madsen

In one of the more memorable exhibitions I’ve seen in quite some time, the Smithsonian American Art Museum presents “Do Ho Suh: Almost Home,” through August 5, 2018. Below is an excerpt from a piece for Architectural Record:

Some people who want to remember the places they’ve been collect souvenirs, refrigerator magnets, tchotchkes, or other pocket-sized signifiers of place; others create albums full of photos taken on whatever cameras were available during their stay. Not so for Do Ho Suh, whose ability to recall and reproduce places makes him perhaps the most compelling architectural artist alive.

Suh’s exhibition, “Almost Home,” which opens today at Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), explores the intersections of space, time, and memory as they relate to the most intimate places he has inhabited. Details rendered perfectly in hand-stitched, translucent fabrics lend an air of absolute authenticity to his “Specimens,” which are ethereal takes on quotidian household objects such as doorknobs, thermostats, circuit breaker boxes, and radiators. These articles—some hardware, some appliances, each more exquisite than the last—line the walls of the exhibition, categorized by the places where Suh lived and observed them.

“My own personal experience of trans-cultural displacement is what motivates my inquiry into the motion of space,” Suh says at the exhibition’s opening lecture. He speaks of his upbringing in Seoul, in a house that was itself a replica of a scholar’s cottage; and of his immigration to the United States at the age of 29, in 1991. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, and earned his graduate degree at Yale, before settling in New York, where he lived for 20 years. In those two decades, he began to do rubbings of his dwelling, putting to paper the imprints of the space in which his daughters would learn to crawl as patterns to be cut, stitched, and reassembled into full-scale cloth replicas of that apartment.

Read the full story at Architectural Record.

Installation view of Do Ho Suh: Almost Home at the Smithsonian American Art Museum | © Deane Madsen

Do Ho Suh: Almost Home at SAAM | © Deane Madsen

Installation view of Corridor, Wieland Strasse, 18, 12159 Berlin, Germany, 2013, by Do Ho Suh

Former Memphis Distribution Center Gets Platinum Makeover

On February 25, 2018

by Deane

Crosstown Concourse in Architectural Record’s March 2018 issue

Declines in U.S. manufacturing and industry have led to a reverse hermit-crab effect, wherein companies are leaving behind empty shells of buildings that are too large for other companies to inhabit comfortably. But within these husks lies an amount of embodied energy so great that the environmental impact—not to mention financial cost—of demolishing them is also too big to bear. While adaptive reuse of industrial facilities is hardly new behavior, the scale and environmental consciousness of a recent redevelopment in Memphis called Crosstown Concourse serves as a demonstration of how cities can turn empty warehouses into communities of symbiotic entities beneath a single roof. Below is an excerpt from an article that appeared in the March 2018 issue of Architectural Record.

In 1993, when retailer Sears, Roebuck closed its mail-order catalogue business, it also shuttered distribution plants around the country, including one in Memphis that just sat abandoned. A quarter of a century later, the 1.3 million-square-foot facility has been transformed into the Crosstown Concourse, an innovative mixed-use property designed by the local firm Looney Ricks Kiss (LRK) in collaboration with the Vancouver office of DIALOG.

The project, completed last year, was the brainchild of artist Christopher Miner and University of Memphis art history professor Todd Richardson. Crosstown Concourse is home to a health center, arts and education groups, a high school, and 265 apartments.

When LRK principals Tony Pellicciotti and Frank Ricks first visited the site, the building was in serious disrepair. Since the closure of the distribution center, no money had been spent on upkeep, but the 1920s building itself was in solid shape. Its all-concrete frame had been designed to support live loads of 250 to 300 pounds per square foot. A 1960s steel-column-supported addition suffered though, in large part due to thieves who undermined the structure in search of copper flashing. Because of its significant mass, the center was too expensive to demolish, but the right redevelopment formula proved elusive until Richardson and Miner stepped up to form Crosstown Arts.

Read the full article at Architectural Record.

The AIA versus Tax Reform

On February 9, 2018

by Deane

That mammoth tax bill will have repercussions for years to come, but how will it affect architects? That’s the question I was asked to tackle for a recent piece in Architectural Record, specifically looking at what role the AIA’s lobbying arm played in securing policies friendly to architects, and how successful it was in those efforts:

In the aftermath of last year’s election—in which AIA CEO Robert Ivy quickly committed to work with the President-elect on behalf of the entire AIA member body, then just as quickly issued several apologies—the AIA learned how polarized and how vocal its membership was. When strategizing positions related to tax reform, the AIA recognized that its members were as varied in their views as the country’s population, representing every shade on the political spectrum. Thus the AIA chose to focus on three issues that would have ramifications for all architects, regardless of their party affiliation: fair treatment for architects under the new tax laws; protection of the Federal Historic Tax Credit; and the preservation of another tax credit, known as 179D, for efficient building. “The bill at large had the ability to impact all architects in different ways,” says Cindy Schwartz, a senior director for advocacy within the AIA. “We’ve limited our communications and our work to these specific issues.”

I also had the distinct pleasure of speaking with architect Marsha Maytum of Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects about historic credits, which her firm has leveraged in several Bay Area projects to achieve successful outcomes that would have been impossible without them:

Without those tax credits, some projects simply wouldn’t happen, according to Marsha Maytum, FAIA, a principal with Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects in San Francisco as well as the incoming chair of the AIA’s Committee on the Environment. “Oftentimes, a landmarked building will have a lot of restrictions on what can and can’t be done to it, and if it’s not financially viable to rehabilitate it, it will just continue to decay,” Maytum says. “The tax credits provide some additional financial support to the organization trying to preserve the landmarked building.”

Read the full story at Architectural Record.

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