“For the harmonious and contextually sensitive renovation of the row of storefront facades on the east side of Madison Avenue immediately north of 88th Street,” the Carnegie Hill Neighbors will recognize the Board of Directors of 47 East 88th Street on May 13, 2013 at the National Academy Museum.
View of storefronts AFTER renovation. Image by Stan Honda from Carnegie Hill News Spring 2013, Vol. 34, No. 1.
I am charged with offering concluding remarks and answering the questions of what the future holds and what challenges we face to meet that future. Before I do, I would like to thank our hosts and offer a special thanks to Michael Lykoudis for his vision for this conference. I also would like to take this opportunity to thank those people who have been so critical to the path of my own career – Bill Westfall, Thomas Gordon Smith, Rodney Cook, Richard John and my dear friends at the Institute.
Now, what challenges do we face and how do we meet them? Well, to consider this, I am first going to take my gloves off for a moment and succumb to what I would call realism, or what Michael Lykoudis has called pessimism, and then I will put my gloves back on and, hopefully, conclude on a polite, optimistic note.
Three Generations of Classical Architects conference speakers, panelists, and attendees, University of Notre Dame (2005)
“A place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it – have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation.”– Wallace Stegner, The Sense of Place, 1992
Through my windshield I watch the sinuous River Road fade into gray as a summer storm lets loose its rains on waving fields of sugar cane. Here in southern Louisiana, driving between Laura and Oak Alley plantations on a sultry August afternoon, I am reminded of how powerful and precious place is to who we are and how we live.
Sometimes the best way to measure a city is to set out without destination and see how the city reveals itself to you. I did just this recently on my first trip to Calgary. Having studied a map of the city prior to my trip, and finding a neatly gridded, compact plan, snuggled in the arc of two rivers between the flat prairies and the rolling foothills of the Canadian Rockies, I imagined in my traditional urbanist’s mind’s eye, a beautiful city in the clear Canadian air. While exploring Calgary I was at turns disappointed and delighted.
February 9, 2011
My dear friends and colleagues,
I wish I could be with you today, but it is a good sign I could not be, since a lecture to over 200 architects in Boston yesterday meant I could not make a late evening flight to London. Indeed, while the years beginning in the fall of 2008 have been terrifyingly slow, over the last six to eight months there has been a palpable optimism that we will recover.
Shearith Israel, the Oldest Jewish Congregation in North America, Unveils First Phase of the Preservation of Its 1829 Cemetery On West 21st Street
See coverage from DNAInfo.com
Thirteen years now I have lived without a car. On my own two feet, or by subway, bus, taxi, or ferry, I’ve easily navigated nearly every corner of New York, from the tip of Manhattan to the Bronx. So, I thought, walking from my temporary residence at Notre Dame, where I am a visiting professor in the School of Architecture this semester, a mile or so to FedEx/Kinko’s would be a nice Saturday morning stroll.
