JA Architecture Studio—founded by Iranian-Canadian architects Nima Javidi and Behnaz Assadi—has been selected by The Architectural League of New York for its 2022 Emerging Voices competition and lecture series. Javidi is currently The Cooper Union’s Gwathmey Professor in Architecture; Assadi is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

Being named an Emerging Voice by The Architectural League is one of the most coveted awards in North American architecture. Since 1982, the program has identified more than 300 awardees who have since developed influential careers. Paul Lewis, an Emerging Voices jury member and president of The Architectural League, describes the 2022 winners, noting: 

“In our initial review of the applications for this year’s Emerging Voices, the jury was struck by the breadth of the different types of work. But, rather than indicating a fracturing of our discipline, this year’s winners were united in how they each clarified new types of agency, and new notions of value motivated by an optimism about what an architect could and should do.”

JA Architecture Studio is a Toronto-based practice that emphasizes light wood frame construction, geometric experimentation, and vernacular form. From the narrow plots of Toronto’s Queen West neighborhood to large-scale international design competitions, the Studio employs a “one-to-one” process, defined by Assadi and Javidi as a design approach shaped by “the physical register of immigration, of being slightly off from the context that you aspire to fit within, struggle with, and eventually change.” 

Through conversations that range from the role of public art with curators to the wood joinery of a three-legged chair with a local furniture maker, the Studio investigates the core of architecture by operating at numerous points around its periphery, connecting Studio themes and interests to those of the world at large. This approach was not chosen for its assurance of success, but as a way of investigating the merit and relevance of the Studio’s ideas across as wide a variety of scales and contexts as possible.

JA Architecture Studio has pursued a broad repertoire of built works, research projects, and award-winning competition entries, which together have been published widely and exhibited both nationally and internationally. Studio projects include Bore-ing Lightness, a finalist proposal for the Canadian pavilion at the 2020 Venice Biennale; Wardell, a curved, brick-clad addition to an existing string of row houses in Toronto; and Forno Cultura, a cafe and bakery on the site of a former mechanic’s garage in Toronto. The Studio has also received numerous recognitions from Canadian Architect, as well as two Progressive Architecture Awards from Architect Magazine, the most recent a Merit Award for the studio's project One and a Half.

Javidi and Assadi will present their Emerging Voices lecture on Thursday, March 17, 2022, in Cooper Union's Great Hall. Advance registration with The Architectural League—available here—is required.

A Design IV studio section led by Stella Betts traveled to Albany this past week to visit the Empire State Plaza, the subject of her studio’s brief. 

Titled Re-Imagining Empire State Plaza, the studio is both an urban and architectural investigation. Conceived and designed by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and the architect Wallace Harrison, Empire Plaza was built in New York’s capital city of Albany in the late 1960s and early 70s, and is a paradigm of modernist urban planning. Through a series of choreographed operations, Betts is prompting students to deeply re-adapt the plaza by transforming its relationship to its larger urban context and infrastructural systems, rethinking its program and use, adapting its existing buildings to become carbon neutral, and imaging a new kind of public plaza for the people of Albany and the citizens of New York. 

The field trip featured visits to the plaza’s buildings, including a performing arts venue known as The Egg, Corning Tower and its observation deck overlooking the city, the New York State Museum and Library, the Justice Building, and the concourse below the plaza. In addition, the studio visited two H.H. Richardson buildings—the State Capital, with its famous “million dollar stair” completed in 1899, and Albany City Hall, completed in 1883.

2016 School of Architecture graduate Diego Salazar recently completed New York Titans, a multimedia project honoring New York City’s built environment. Initiated in response to his 2016 encounter with the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, the work began with his vision for a large drawing to commemorate, twenty years later, those who lost their lives on 9/11. As Salazar developed a visual language that transposes human and architectural form, he began a parallel effort to create a series of drawings featuring iconic New York City buildings. He would create fourteen drawings, all at 36 x 60 inches.

Over the next five years, Salazar expanded New York Titans to include several collaborators, some of them former Cooper Union classmates. He had started a company, Studio Rombo, which represents and collaborates with artists and designers, and began traveling to Oaxaca, Mexico to meet local artists and artisans. Diego quickly realized that he could combine his two endeavors and commissioned Oaxacan artists to create, along with him, work for New York Titans. He also reconnected with his childhood friend Rafael Quijano, a practicing artist, in late 2020. Salazar invited in Quijano to develop artworks based on the Titans concept and in return Quijano agreed to find an exhibition venue for the project as a whole.

Salazar expanded his collaborative effort to include additional artists, reaching out to Vanessa Tai AR’16 and Akash Godbole AR’17, who created digital artwork—available as NFTs—for the Titans theme. The group soon grew to include five fellow Cooper Union Architecture graduates: Connor Holjes, Hui Rong Liu, Jieun (Hannah) Kim, Kelsey Lee, and Joey Parrella, all 2017 alumni. Each of them made work for the Titans project using their own techniques and perspectives.

In the summer of 2021 Diego turned to his former classmate Janine Wang AR’16 commissioning her to fabricate a large frame to house his tribute to 9/11. On September 11th, 2021 Salazar presented his drawing via Instagram, and on November 2nd, the Day of the Dead—inspired by his days in Oaxaca—he installed the drawing inside Janine’s frame, creating an altar and placing it, along with marigold flowers and candles, in Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick to honor those who perished on 9/11.

An exhibition of Diego’s New York Titans drawings, as well as the work of his collaborators, was held at Luxuny Atelier in December 2021. Jorge Islas Lopez, the Consul General of Mexico in New York, attended the opening reception. 

In reflecting on his five-year journey, Diego stated “I feel gratified, but with an ever-stronger desire to continue creating and collaborating with other artists. I hope this is the first of many future projects and exhibitions.”

Assistant Professor Michael Young’s new book—Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image (Routledge Publishing)—is the subject of an in-depth review by Davis Richardson in The Architect’s Newspaper. 

Published in the fall of 2021, Reality Modeled After Images shows, according to Young, “how design is impacted and changed by shifts in image culture, representational conventions and technologies.” In his introduction, Young remarks that typical discussions of architecture and politics frequently overlook “what it is that architects labor over in the day-to-day negotiations that define and redefine the discipline.” Namely, conventions:

“The values that define a discipline are maintained through its conventions. Conventions are what is taught, what is handed down, what links generations. They consist of tools and techniques, norms and models for the production and interpretation of what qualifies as significant work. Conventions specify acceptable modes of appearance, verify expertise, and narrate lineage. They defend the boundaries of what constitutes a discipline.”

Young interrogates these boundaries through, as Richardson notes, “a broad range of topics—including politics, labor, machine vision and surveillance capitalism, lidar and photogrammetry, and ornament, among many others—without feeling disjointed…” 

“Reality Modeled After Images is organized around three central themes that come out of the École des Beaux-Arts: pochė, entourage, and mosaȉque. The pochė, or the spaces hidden from view by architectural representation; the entourage, or all the extra, ‘non-architectural’ elements that populate architectural plans and drawings such as plantings or scale figures, and the mosaȉque. All involve the rendering of surfaces, all had less to do with any one particular design solution or strategy, historically, and more to do with the classical, disciplinary methods of representing those designs, much of which has persisted to today, as Young lays out.”

Richardson further observes that “While these themes serve as an effective structural and thematic device that binds the book together, it reads like a series of longer, separate essays that could stand on their own, if they wanted, but still manage to mesh well within a larger whole. It is closer to a highly curated journal with a consistent voice than a traditional book, with only six chapters—two for each theme—yet never feels too brief nor stretched thin.”

In addition to his writing, research, and teaching at The Cooper Union, Young is a co-founder of YOUNG & AYATA, an award-winning, Brooklyn-based design practice.