How do you spend your Friday evening? Do you join those who pack NYC’s cultural institutions like sardines or those crowds over populating film theaters? When the Center for Architecture, one of the City’s premier cultural institutions, hosts a pair of NYC’s most interesting and provocatively creative thinkers, it will certainly lift your spirits.
This series of dialogues about design pairs a notable architect with a recognized critic, journalist, curator, or architectural historian to discuss current architecture and other design issues. Since you shouldn’t start Friday night without an adequate drink, we’ll provide a custom-crafted cocktails inspired by the architect’s work and created in-situ for this event. Join us in growing the tradition of “Delight Night” in New York’s weekend cultural scene—no Blight Night here.
Speakers:
Thomas Balsley, FASLA, Principal, Thomas Balsley Associates
Matt Shaw, Senior Editor, The Architect’s Newspaper
Thomas Balsley is the lead designer of Thomas Balsley Associates, a NYC-based urban landscape architecture firm whose work has had a profound impact on the built environment and the quality of life in cities across the US. His unique fusion of creativity and innovation with public process has produced extraordinary spaces large and small, provocative and sublime. His firm’s portfolio of award-winning projects and competitions include Dallas’ Main Street Garden, Cleveland’s Perk Park, Tampa’s Curtis Hixon Park, Tokyo’s Gate City, and Seoul’s Leeum Samsung Museum of Art. Closer to home, his highly acclaimed parks such as Riverside Park South, Gantry Plaza Park, Hunter’s Point South, Rockefeller Plaza, and Capitol Plaza have helped reshape NYC’s public realm. In an unprecedented acknowledgement of that contribution, a park on 57th Street was renamed in his honor as Balsley Park. His teaching and speaking engagements at Harvard GSD, University of Pennsylvania, the National Building Museum, Seoul National University, among others, together with a wealth of publications and TV appearances, such as BBC’s “Around the World in 80 Gardens,” have exposed his work to a broader international audience. In the Spacemaker Press monograph Thomas Balsley: The Urban Landscape,New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp’s foreword states, “Balsley inscribes places with a dual portrait of nature and culture in modern dress.” He is the subject of the recently released monograph Thomas Balsley Uncommon Ground, published by ORO with foreword by James Corner and essay by Ian Volner. He is also the 13th recipient of the ASLA’s highest honor, The Design Medal, for body of exceptional design work.
Matt Shaw is the Senior Editor of The Architect’s Newspaper. He is also the founder and co-editor of Mockitecture, a half-manifesto/half-satire collection of architectural debauchery. He has worked for the Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting (C-Lab), Storefront for Art and Architecture, Architizer, and has been published in The Architectural Review, Beyond, Domus, and Icon. He wrote and researched two editions of the guidebook Europe’s Top 100 Architecture and Design Schools for Domus. Shaw leads the experimental research group the Critical Method Unit (CMU) at Syracuse University NYC Architecture Program and has been an invited critic at numerous schools including Yale University, Columbia University, and UCLA.
Organized by: AIANY Architecture Dialogue Committee, ASLA, and CultureNow
Price: One drink included: $15 for AIA & ASLA members; $20 for non-members
