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Eavesdrop: Editors

Eavesdrop: Editors

HADID RAKES IT IN
Our intermittent EavesDropper Alexander Gorlin alerted us to a report from the February 23 issue of Building Magazine about Zaha Hadid’s financial performance. “Architect Zaha Hadid has posted her best ever set of financial results,” according to the article. “Pre-tax profit shot up to £1.2 million for the year ending April 2006.” Hadid’s more than 100 employees might (or might not) be surprised to learn that “the firm’s directors—Hadid and Patrick Schumacher— together earned about £531,000 last year. The highest paid director, understood to be Hadid, took home £331,000.” That’s roughly $636,700. “It seems like a lot of money when you compare it to other architects,” said Gorlin, clearly stimulated by the naked figures. “But when you think about it, it’s shocking how little she makes, given that she’s considered one of the top architects in the world. Among most architecture clients, that amount is nothing.”

MAKING CRAFT COOL
Two of the refugees in Dwell‘s recent mass exodus have surfaced on the local publishing scene: Former Dwell executive editor Andrew Wagner has teamed up with the magazine’s founding creative director Jeanette Abbink to revampAmerican Craft magazine. Wagner said he and Abbink have been investigating different production techniques to make the magazine reflect the DIY slant of its contents. “We’re looking at different things we can do to show a human component,” he said. The first issue will appear in the fall, and who is writing one of the first feature stories? Dwell’s founding editor, Karrie Jacobs.

IF YOU BEND IT, WILL THEY COME?
At a recent press preview of the MoMA’s Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years, opening in June, Richard Serra paced the sedate meeting room telling stories about his attempts to realize his unwieldy works. The artist used a whiteboard to demonstrate his thinking behind his torques and ellipses (“The radius doesn’t change in elevation,” he enthused about one piece). “It felt like a master class,” said art and architecture writer Tracey Hummer. When asked whether the show was initially meant to coincide with the inauguration of Yoshio Taniguchi’s new building, Serra responded, “We wanted the building to settle first.” Not a bad idea. The multi-ton sculptures will be installed in the museum’s sculpture garden and the second- and sixth-floor galleries.

PREFAB AT PRATT
Spring has sprung! It feels like California in Fort Greene and it might start looking like it now that Pratt has caught the prefab bug. Design nut Avi Telyas is pushing the Pratt Institute, where he serves as trustee, to investigate prefab. The school helped organize a competition to design a prefab dormitory for a Pratt-owned site, which would also produce ideas to invigorate his latest purchase, Kullman Industries, once the world’s foremost producer of roadside diners. Telyas picked the shortlist himself: Garrison Architects, Marble Fairbanks, Narofsky Architecture, Obra Architects, and Peter Gluck & Partners. Not a Pratt professor among them, to the dismay of faculty members! Architecture dean Tom Hanrahan, who judged the competition with Barry Bergdoll and Kenneth Frampton, demurred on the oversight: “We didn’t push it,” he said. So what’s Pratt getting in return, since the dorm is hypothetical at this point? Telyas has pledged $250,000 to establish a new prefab research lab, the Kullman Center.

SEND OBSERVATIONS, TIPS, SUGGESTIONS, FLOWERS, ET CETERA, TOEDITOR@ARCHPAPER.COM 


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