Jeff Byles

Remaking Gateway

Gateway National Recreation Area—a 26,000-acre landscape spanning three boroughs, two states, and an ungodly collection of airfield detritus, coastal defenses, and marshlands in varying states of decay—is like no national park you've ever seen. I'm proud to have played a role as consulting editor on a new book that looks at the park's past and possible futures. Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park culminates a research and design initiative that re-envisioned the role of urban nature in the twenty-first century, and tells a powerful story about New York City as a complex cultural and ecological canvas.

Image credit: Laura McPhee

Philadelphia Story

Like many of America's once-mighty powerhouses, Philadelphia is a spectral city, a post-urban place where the saga of metropolitan eclipse and renewal is now playing out. For the past seven years, artist Jacob Hellman has lived and worked in North Philadelphia, a landscape of factories and churches and row houses in extremis. His website is well worth perusing, a moving chronicle of the dust-choked present at a time when our nation's future as a collective social enterprise is not at all a sure thing.

Image credit: Jacob Hellman

Archtober on the High Line

New York's first-annual Architecture and Design Month kicks off in October, and there's no better time and place to explore the story of design history than in the 21st-century epicenter of post-meatpacking urbanity—the High Line, that is. Ann Ferebee and I join the fray along the elevated oasis on Friday, October 7 with a talk inspired by Frank Gehry's IAC Building, the Archtober Building of the Day. Come take in the view! RSVP here.

Image credit: Jules Antonio/Flickr

Visions of the Vanguard

My new history of modern design, co-written with Ann Ferebee, is out! We've been having a wonderful time sharing the story behind the icons of twentieth-century modernism, and tracing this lineage of high-spirited design innovation ahead to today's knock-out-brilliant architects, landscape architects, interior designers, product designers, and photographers. Thanks to The New York Times and Metropolis for great coverage of the book, and to 92YTribeca and The Skyscraper Museum for hosting two terrific programs. Come to the New York Public Library on August 24 for a third event featuring modern design history, looking at the global vanguard in Russia, Germany, and beyond that sparked the modern spirit. (Oh, and buy the book—a perfect back-to-school resource for the budding designer in your life!)

Image credit: Patricia Wall / Courtesy The New York Times

Modern Design Redux

 
Over the past year, I've been privileged to work on a new edition of a classic design history text by the urban historian and Institute for Urban Design founder Ann Ferebee. Due out this summer from W.W. Norton, the book's title sums it up pretty much definitively: A History of Design from the Victorian Era to the Present: A Survey of the Modern Style in Architecture, Interior Design, Industrial Design, Graphic Design, and Photography. Stay tuned for lectures, events, and the book launch celebrating more than a century of fast-moving modern design, from the Crystal Palace of 1851 to the epoch-defining iPhone.

Saluting Ezra Stoller

Among the discoveries of the small but stupendous new show of prints from midcentury architectural photographer Ezra Stoller—on view at New York's Yossi Milo Gallery—is this 1960 shot of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's First National City Bank on the site of the future JFK airport in Queens. Like Mies landed on a midwestern prairie, the building still stands, though a far cry from the mirage-like miracle seen in Stoller's opulent lenswork.

Image credit: Ezra Stoller/Esto

Thinking About Shrinking

Berlin may be on an upswing as Europe's culture capital, but not far away, scores of small and midsize cities across the former East Germany have been ravaged by plummeting populations, unemployment, and rampant disinvestment. Now, 19 of these shrinking cities are being reinvented thanks to Germany's legendary IBA building program, which has found a promising model for healthy urban futures by scaling down.

Image credit: Doreen Ritzau

Sullivan on Film

There have been many worthy architectural documentaries in recent years, but you’ll definitely want to check out Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture. Recently given its New York premiere, this touching and tragic film profiles the man who aspired to create an American style of architecture, yet was left behind by a nation on the cusp of a century that he himself did much to define.

Image credit: Courtesy Whitecap Films

Wealth of Health for Chickasaw Nation

With a health care system serving 40,000 Native Americans annually, the Chickasaw Nation, based in the central Oklahoma town of Ada, puts the rest of the U.S. to shame with its commitment to universal, patient-centered care. The tribe's latest laurel is a $145 million monument to humane hospital design.

Image credit: Art Gray

Miller Time at Riverside South?

The noxious Miller Highway has long blemished a stretch of Riverside Park on New York's Upper West Side, spewing grime and casting shadow onto Thomas Balsley's resplendent new landscape below. But unbeknownst to passing rollerbladers, Extell Development has been quietly completing a $60 million tunnel shell to bury the blighted highway and craft a monumental 3/4-mile-long public space.

Image credit: Courtesy Thomas Balsley Associates