Bestor's Silent Disco via.
This month my recent story Emerging Talent hits the cover of Architect magazine. The piece looks at young practices and the non-profits, galleries, and institiutions that support them. As I interviewed curators, program directors, and architects, I kept asking them to weigh on on the need to support an emerging generation of practitioners. When I complied their answers I was excited to find a portrait of the profession that was critical of the status quo, but not cynical or passive. On the whole, these emergents and their supporters: Materials & Applications, Superfront, Storefront for Art and Architecture and Snarkitecture, Agency and the Academy in Rome, Barbara Bestor and SCI-Arc, Lead Pencil Studio and The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Interboro Partners and PS1, stARTT and MAXXI, and the Architecture League's Emergent Voices and AIA Young Architect Award winners, were pushing well beyond standard disiplinary and professinal models, working with broader communities, and really blazing their own paths even in a difficult market.
“In Italy, architects like us, under 35 years old, are not considered able to pull off a public project, but YAP shows that, we, as generation, can demonstrate the opposite.”—Simone Capra, stART
“It bothers me that primarily wealthy individuals and well-funded institutions engage with architects. This may sound incredibly presumptuous or haughty—that a little upstart nonprofit could contribute anything to the promotion of a profession hundreds of years old—but I am talking about the significance of small conversations across disciplines.”—Mitch McEwen, Superfront
“Built work—whether in installations or ‘bricks and mortar’—is both a crucial form of engagement and ever more difficult to achieve due to the institutionalization of so many building practices. There are fewer design-centric architecture projects to do out there. It is not a new problem, but it is hard to get new interesting or challenging work built in the U.S. in this climate. The schools have become crucial to supporting the next generation.”—Barbara Bestor
“[Students] take classes about ‘social design’ but end up sourcing bathroom fixtures for luxury apartment units. [With ‘Holding Pattern’] we spent a good amount of time talking to taxi-management companies, libraries, high schools, senior and daycare centers, community gardens, the post office, and dozens of other Long Island City–based institutions. We feel like a part of the neighborhood and that makes us happy.”—Dan D’Oca, Interboro
“If we are to change the terms of production, thinking, and action, the younger generation—the one that is fearless, full of intuition more than knowledge, with vectors of desire more than with constructed paths of action—is the one that needs to take the lead in shaping the future that lies ahead.”—Eva Franch i Gilabert