Jeff Byles

Buffalo Revisited

Last month, I had the privilege of presenting a paper on the preservation of failed spaces with Buffalo-based artist Dennis Maher, whose Fargo House project explores the fertile ground between demolition and construction. A "center for the urban imagination" crafted within the shells of two adjacent homes on Buffalo's West Side, the Fargo House is an ongoing assemblage that merges art, architecture, and civic activism. Don't miss Maher's extraordinary artist residency at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, where he collaborated with construction tradespeople to create a labyrinthine tribute to the poetic power of the building arts.

Pictured: Dennis Maher's The Fargo House in Buffalo.

Gravel Pits and Green Growth

The Hudson River Valley is a landscape locked in existential crisis—a place of vaunted natural beauty, but one whose postindustrial downslide has pushed scores of small and midsize cities to the brink of an economic abyss. Now, New York architect Meta Brunzema has advanced an outsize idea to turn this land of old traprock quarries and Superfund sites into prime territory for the reinvention of the region's future.

Pictured: Poughkeepsie's Clinton Point Quarry. Image credit: Courtesy CLUI Photo Archive

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

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

Fallingwater's New Bedfellows

For years, overnight visitors attending Fallingwater’s educational programs have bunked down in a cramped, four-bedroom house near Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterwork in Mill Run, Pennsylvania. But Wright devotees will soon have the luxury of living in Patkau Architects’ competition-winning design for six low-impact, energy-efficient cottages.

Image credit: Courtesy Patkau Architects

Here Is New York

Taking a snapshot of New York is no easy feat, as the Architectural League learned after setting out to capture sundry megaprojects, condominiums, newly-seeded parks, and a real estate landscape reeling from the recession.

Image credit: Jason Tax