Articles by Kaley Overstreet

As the COVID-19 global pandemic has unfolded over the last several months, stories of people cooped up in crowded cities and concerned about their future have anecdotally popped up across the internet. When the virus first arrived, it was common for people to escape to their beach-side homes, or to return to their parent’s house for more space and a sprawling yard.

It’s hard to imagine New York City without the packed subway cars, long lines, and overwhelming tourist crowds that felt essential to daily life. Once the fear of the COVID-19 pandemic has waned, the city, like others around the world, will become clouded and fundamentally altered even after economic prosperity has been restored. In what feels like a revolving door discussion, except now perhaps asked with a sense of urgency, what do we want cities to be like in the years to come?

In the 20th Century, New York City became an epicenter of newly constructed buildings that quickly gained an iconic status. While they greatly influenced new ways that we think about aesthetics and space, many of them met their demise less than 60 years after their commissioning. It seems that in the modern age of mass development, and where a wrecking ball symbolizes progress forward, no building is safe. The tenacity to tear down even these structures deemed to be culturally significant speaks to how architects are quick to dismiss ideas about how long we plan for buildings to live and how we decide when its time for them to come down.

Between the late 1940s to the 1980s, Toronto, Canada, experienced a high rate of growth and development, resulting in a wealth of modernist-style buildings. Due to an increasing population, parishes were also outgrowing their spaces and found themselves in need of new facilities. Consequently, many well-designed modernist churches began to pop up throughout Toronto. This black and white photography series, titled Fifty/50 by Amanda Large, is an ode to these churches, and a celebration of their enduring importance to the city more than fifty years after their construction.

When Jane Jacobs famously said, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody,” she might as well have been foreshadowing the successful partnership formed between SHoP Architects, James Corner Field Operations, and Two Trees Management. The team, who collaborated on the 11-acre Domino Park master plan in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has been hailed for creating a benchmark standard in perfecting the process for designing and understanding what it means to maintain a park that actively participates in a two-way dialogue with the community.

Few architectural typologies have the power to invoke a sense of being dual-natured quite like the modernist swimming pool can. The design of pools themselves implies that there are moments of activity both above and below the water. Above, and in the more obvious and visible sense, pools act as a space for leisure and athletic training. But underneath the surface, swimming pools have a long-standing history of acting as symbols of surveillance, death, and social conditions associated with an economic class.

“Out with the old and in with the new,”….or so they say. In the United States, a cloud of dust and debris paired with a wrecking ball and bulldozer tends to represent signs of forward progress, innovation, economic activity, and the hope for a better future through architectural design.

When we hear the term visualization, it’s likely that we picture a flashy render full of lights, people, dazzling finishes, and a sense of energy about the place that we are viewing. Aside from rendering a three-dimensional space, architects also need to develop their skills in the representation of intangible ideas that help drive the narrative behind their arguments. Instead of creating one-off concepts that are presented in a traditionally linear sequence, designers need to craft a story, structure their designs like a thesis, and consider how our presentations have the power to reveal the priorities of a project.

When Rashed Singaby, Principal at HOK, was contacted by a former client about how an existing stadium could be retrofitted to host esports events, he immediately knew this was an opportunity to create a blueprint for a type of space that has never existed before. Singaby and his team formulated a small research group to test and understand both the standards for each type of esports game and classify them into operational substructures. Since each game requires its own type of setup, it was important to ultimately conceptualize the design ideas and make recommendations for how existing spaces could be modified in order to best consume and be involved in the experience of esports activities.

Havana appeals to those who romanticize the idea of a city that seems to be completely frozen in time. The capital’s urban fabric proudly displays its history, as it experienced waves of Spanish, Moorish, and Soviet influence. What really lies beyond the Revolutionary kitsch of vintage Buicks parked in front of colorful, yet crumbling homes, is the deprivation that Cuba has experienced throughout history.