Business
& Labor
Popular Architecture Forum Launches in New York
(archrecord.construction.com - 11/01/2006)
By Fred
A. Bernstein
It’s architecture’s version
of speed dating. At Pecha Kucha, an event born in Tokyo in
2003 and introduced to New Yorkers in September, architects
are allowed 400 seconds to show 20 images of their work. “There’s
no saying ‘back’ to the projectionist,” explains
Klein Dytham Architecture principal Mark Dytham, who began
organizing the events with partner Astrid Klein. Indeed, the
projectionist changes the slide every 20 seconds, ready or
not.
The first Pecha Kucha New York was held,
incongruously, in a beer garden in Queens. While competition
from a dozen other architecture-related events the same September
evening portended a low turnout, more than 500 people, mostly
young professionals, filled the outdoor space to overflowing.
“Zaha Hadid must be speaking to an audience of three
people tonight,” said an ebullient Dytham.
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Sarah Oppenheimer, a conceptual artist,
presented a “piece” in which sculptural objects
were classified according to the Dewey Decimal System, while
landscape architect Kate Orff of New York’s SCAPE did
a brilliant riff on the tension between answering emails and
actually working. Other presenters offered more conventional,
if speedy, slide shows: Dytham, whose firm is based in Tokyo,
showed a narrow house constructed as part of a billboard in
that city; New Yorkers Ben Aranda and Chris Lasch showed the
10 Mile Spiral, a traffic interchange-cum-casino for Las Vegas;
Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang of nArchitects, also a New York
firm, presented “Wind Shape,” an installation they
completed this summer in Lacoste, France.
ShoP Architects’ Gregg Pasquarelli
announced that he was going to show “illicit images”—ones
the clients had never released—that included rejected
proposals for the East River Park, a building in Little Italy
that brilliantly skirts the historic-district requirement
that the facade be made of bricks, and renderings of a new
Rector Street Bridge to replace the temporary bridge the firm
designed shortly after 9/11. He added that if there were any
reporters present, he would “deny the whole thing in
the morning.” It’s exactly that kind of subversion
that defines Pecha Kucha, Dytham says: “We try and get
the better-known designers to show something they couldn't
normally show at a 'real' lecture. We all know what they do—show
us something unexpected.”
The tack seemed to appeal to Reed
Langhofer, a 26-year-old architectural designer at Perkins
Eastman, who said he would attend the next Pecha Kucha while
sharing a pitcher of Hoegaarden with a group of friends from
Tulane’s architecture school. “We've had fun, and
the presenters seemed to have fun, too," he said, adding
that the format meant “we got to see a lot more work
than in a normal lecture.” Check pecha-kucha.org for
news of the next event.
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