Building Never Built New York

Building Never Built New York

Greg Goldin, Writer and Co-Curator, Never Built New York
Larissa Harris, Curator, Queens Museum of Art
Sam Lubell, Writer and Co-Curator, Never Built New York
Christian Wassmann, Principal, Studio Christian Wassmann

In conversation with Josh Jordan, Fabrication Lab Director, and Tei Carpenter, Adjunct Assistant Professor, GSAPP.

Hidden behind New York City’s iconic skyscrapers, sprawling subway system and world famous public parks is the ghost of the city that could have been – a parallel metropolis that can reveal the city’s goals, strengths and challenges.

Never Built New York is an exhibition presented at the Queens Museum. It is co-curated by Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin, designed by Christian Wassman, and fabricated in part by Josh Jordan and GSAPP students. The exhibition collaborators discuss their work bringing speculative architecture about NYC into physical form through original prints, drawings, models, installations, and animations.

Speakers

Greg Goldin was the architecture critic at Los Angeles Magazine from 1999 to 2011. In 2011, he was awarded a Getty Institute Research Grant which led to his exhibition Windshield Perspective, Architecture and Design Museum (2013), a study of vernacular Los Angeles architecture. In summer 2013, he co-curated and co‐authored Never Built Los Angeles. His last curatorial contribution was to the Getty Museum’s No Further West (2014), an exhibition about the making of Los Angeles’s Union Station. His writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Architectural Record, Architect’s Newspaper, and Zocalo, among many others.

Larissa Harris is a curator at the Queens Museum of Art. Exhibitions at QMA include Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center, a project on home finance by artist and urban designer Damon Rich; The Curse of Bigness, which featured major works by Survival Research Laboratories, J. Morgan Puett, and Dexter Sinister, among others; and the first U.S. solo presentation of Korean video and performance artist Sung Hwan Kim. From 2004-2008 she was associate director at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT where she and staff commissioned and produced new work by Michael Smith, Damon Rich/ the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), John Malpede, and Xavier Le Roy; instituted a visiting artist series (Vito Acconci/ Acconci Studio, Miranda July, Judith Barry, Seth Price, Dexter Sinister, and Rachel Harrison); a student residency program; and a residency for Boston-area artists.

Sam Lubell is a Staff Writer at Wired and a Contributing Editor at The Architect’s Newspaper. He has written seven books about architecture for Monacelli Press, Rizzoli, Metropolis Books, and Phaidon. He also writes for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, Architect, Architectural Record, Architectural Review, Wallpaper, *Contract, and other publications. He co-curated the A+D Architecture and Design Museum exhibitions Never Built Los Angeles (2013) and Shelter: Rethinking How We Live in Los Angeles (2015).

Christian Wassmann is an architectural designer and the exhibition designer of Never Built New York. Studio Christian Wassmann develops designs influenced by art, geometry, and the cosmos. Projects range from buildings, interiors, site-specific installations, exhibitions, furniture, and lamps. The studio has designed projects such as East Village Radio, Lisson Gallery New York, and the Sun Path House in Miami Beach. Wassmann’s career began as an architectural draftsman in Switzerland at age 15 and since 1997 he has collaborated with like-minded artists and architects. In 2010, Wassmann received the Swiss Art Award in architecture, and in 2012 the studio won the AIA New York New Practice Award.

Free and open to the public.
Organized by Columbia GSAPP.