“Never ask a dean about his numbers,” says Mark Robbins, dean of the School of Architecture at New York’s Syracuse University. He then proceeds to cite chapter and verse from the school’s admissions statistics. In 2005, a year after Robbins started, the school received 550 applications. This year, it attracted 1,300 applicants from 55 countries. The school’s admission rate used to hover just under 50 percent; now it’s a competitive 24 percent. The aspiring architects at Syracuse boast a 3.8 median high school GPA, score high on standardized tests, and hail from all over the country.
The numbers chart an alternative narrative to the story of decline presented in an Oct. 2 article of The Chronicle of Higher Education that raised hackles at Syracuse. Headlined “Syracuse’s Slide,” the story contrasts efforts by university chancellor Nancy Cantor to position the school as an agent of change in the “sagging Rust Belt city” with its drop in the rankings of national universities as measured by U.S. News & World Report.
Just Visiting, by Brad Lynch
To be a visiting critic at Syracuse’s School of Architecture is a process of immersion. More than teaching a design studio, it is about being included in a larger pedagogical experience, one that blurs the distinctions between theory and practice. For a visiting critic, Syracuse provides an innovative environment for interaction between other visiting critics and faculty through lectures, exhibitions, projects, studio reviews, and cocktails. This kind of academic environment isn’t foreign to other architecture programs, but at Syracuse, there is a dynamic that allows the interest of the school to flow into the surrounding community and beyond—to be holistic and inclusive.
The city of Syracuse is still suffering the transition from a postindustrial economy to one that is diversified in business type, smaller in skilled labor force, and far less reliant on manufacturing for commercial success. Yet Syracuse is fortunate. The university has become an incubator for long-term economic growth through a variety of community-based initiatives and programs—specifically channeled through the School of Architecture.
The Near Westside Initiative, for example, exists “to combine the power of art, technology and innovation with neighborhood values and culture to revitalize Syracuse’s Near Westside neighborhood.” The visiting critics’ designs include studios, conceptual ideas for economical and sustainable housing, mixed-use developments, and historic building renovations. These designs slowly developed into actual building projects over just a few years in the Near Westside neighborhood. My own firm firm designed the renovation of the Lincoln Building into live-work apartments and office space. And the “From the Ground Up” competition led to the construction of three innovative green homes by Cook + Fox Architects and Terrapin Bright Green; Onion Flats, Andropogon Associates, Rivera Structural Design, and MaGrann Associates; and Architecture Research Office and Della Valle Bernheimer.
Mark Robbins has set an inspired tone for architects working on campus and throughout the city: in particular by helping to bring about the Warehouse by Gluckman Mayner Architects downtown, the Slocum Hall renovation by Garrison Architects on campus, and the SyracuseCoE by Toshiko Mori Architect, to name but a few. It should not be a surprise that Robbins has championed design innovation and experimentation for many of the community initiatives associated with the university—nor that he continues to have a rare ability to attract emerging and established talent for the visiting critics program, a brilliant faculty, and of course, good students.
Brad Lynch is a principal at Chicago firm Brininstool + Lynch and served as a visiting critic at Syracuse University’s School of Architecture in 2006 and 2008.
Cantor’s critics suggest that the university is devoting too many resources to projects designed to help revitalize the city of Syracuse at the expense of university programs. Yet the counternarrative would have it that the fate of the school and city of Syracuse are intimately linked. Whether or not this affirmating connection between the city of Syracuse is good for the university of Syracuse, it’s been a boon to its School of Architecture—which, under Mark Robbins, has spearheaded the efforts to save the struggling city.
Robbins credits chancellor Cantor with much of the intellectual underpinnings of the drive to reimagine the city of Syracuse. She “understands the city as a layered event,” he says, with social, political, and economic elements. Many of Cantor’s themes—the notion of scholarship in action and the university as a community of experts—can be seen in the Syracuse projects.
The School of Architecture has positioned itself as a center for development of Syracuse’s decaying urban core and as an intellectual laboratory for imagining the reinvigoration of shrinking postindustrial cities. While individual projects proceed on different paths, and are funded by different sources (some public, some private, some nonprofit), many offer opportunities for students and recent graduates to participate. The school has developed a center called Upstate, which acts as a kind of thought leadership incubator for projects and research.
The rehabilitation of a downtown site known as the Warehouse was one of the first of Syracuse’s development projects. Once a cold-storage warehouse and then a furniture showroom for the Dunk & Bright Furniture Co., the rehabbed 1924 building became the interim home of the School of Architecture itself after it was renovated by Syracuse grad Richard Gluckman, FAIA, of Gluckman Mayner Architects, in 2006. The building now houses the design department of the College of Visual and Performing Arts and the School of Architecture’s visiting critic studios, as well as a café and gallery on the ground floor. Garrison Architects completed a renovation of the main School of Architecture building, in 2008.
The presence of the 140,000-square-foot Warehouse space as an anchor of the Armory Square section of downtown Syracuse is an example of what Robbins calls “optimistic urbanism.” While it might seem as though nonprofit institutions gobbling up downtown real estate in a city that is starved for tax revenue is counter-intuitive, Robbins notes that the move turned out to be a catalyst for other development. Parcels have been bought up by private developers. A 300-person engineering firm, O’Brien & Gere, moved into a purpose-built building nearby that was developed by Pioneer Partners in 2010.
“Never ask a dean about his numbers,” says Mark Robbins, dean of the School of Architecture at New York’s Syracuse University. He then proceeds to cite chapter and verse from the school’s admissions statistics. In 2005, a year after Robbins started, the school received 550 applications. This year, it attracted 1,300 applicants from 55 countries. The school’s admission rate used to hover just under 50 percent; now it’s a competitive 24 percent. The aspiring architects at Syracuse boast a 3.8 median high school GPA, score high on standardized tests, and hail from all over the country.
The numbers chart an alternative narrative to the story of decline presented in an Oct. 2 article of The Chronicle of Higher Education that raised hackles at Syracuse. Headlined “Syracuse’s Slide,” the story contrasts efforts by university chancellor Nancy Cantor to position the school as an agent of change in the “sagging Rust Belt city” with its drop in the rankings of national universities as measured by U.S. News & World Report.
Just Visiting, by Brad Lynch
To be a visiting critic at Syracuse’s School of Architecture is a process of immersion. More than teaching a design studio, it is about being included in a larger pedagogical experience, one that blurs the distinctions between theory and practice. For a visiting critic, Syracuse provides an innovative environment for interaction between other visiting critics and faculty through lectures, exhibitions, projects, studio reviews, and cocktails. This kind of academic environment isn’t foreign to other architecture programs, but at Syracuse, there is a dynamic that allows the interest of the school to flow into the surrounding community and beyond—to be holistic and inclusive.
The city of Syracuse is still suffering the transition from a postindustrial economy to one that is diversified in business type, smaller in skilled labor force, and far less reliant on manufacturing for commercial success. Yet Syracuse is fortunate. The university has become an incubator for long-term economic growth through a variety of community-based initiatives and programs—specifically channeled through the School of Architecture.
The Near Westside Initiative, for example, exists “to combine the power of art, technology and innovation with neighborhood values and culture to revitalize Syracuse’s Near Westside neighborhood.” The visiting critics’ designs include studios, conceptual ideas for economical and sustainable housing, mixed-use developments, and historic building renovations. These designs slowly developed into actual building projects over just a few years in the Near Westside neighborhood. My own firm firm designed the renovation of the Lincoln Building into live-work apartments and office space. And the “From the Ground Up” competition led to the construction of three innovative green homes by Cook + Fox Architects and Terrapin Bright Green; Onion Flats, Andropogon Associates, Rivera Structural Design, and MaGrann Associates; and Architecture Research Office and Della Valle Bernheimer.
Mark Robbins has set an inspired tone for architects working on campus and throughout the city: in particular by helping to bring about the Warehouse by Gluckman Mayner Architects downtown, the Slocum Hall renovation by Garrison Architects on campus, and the SyracuseCoE by Toshiko Mori Architect, to name but a few. It should not be a surprise that Robbins has championed design innovation and experimentation for many of the community initiatives associated with the university—nor that he continues to have a rare ability to attract emerging and established talent for the visiting critics program, a brilliant faculty, and of course, good students.
Brad Lynch is a principal at Chicago firm Brininstool + Lynch and served as a visiting critic at Syracuse University’s School of Architecture in 2006 and 2008.
Cantor’s critics suggest that the university is devoting too many resources to projects designed to help revitalize the city of Syracuse at the expense of university programs. Yet the counternarrative would have it that the fate of the school and city of Syracuse are intimately linked. Whether or not this affirmating connection between the city of Syracuse is good for the university of Syracuse, it’s been a boon to its School of Architecture—which, under Mark Robbins, has spearheaded the efforts to save the struggling city.
Robbins credits chancellor Cantor with much of the intellectual underpinnings of the drive to reimagine the city of Syracuse. She “understands the city as a layered event,” he says, with social, political, and economic elements. Many of Cantor’s themes—the notion of scholarship in action and the university as a community of experts—can be seen in the Syracuse projects.
The School of Architecture has positioned itself as a center for development of Syracuse’s decaying urban core and as an intellectual laboratory for imagining the reinvigoration of shrinking postindustrial cities. While individual projects proceed on different paths, and are funded by different sources (some public, some private, some nonprofit), many offer opportunities for students and recent graduates to participate. The school has developed a center called Upstate, which acts as a kind of thought leadership incubator for projects and research.
The rehabilitation of a downtown site known as the Warehouse was one of the first of Syracuse’s development projects. Once a cold-storage warehouse and then a furniture showroom for the Dunk & Bright Furniture Co., the rehabbed 1924 building became the interim home of the School of Architecture itself after it was renovated by Syracuse grad Richard Gluckman, FAIA, of Gluckman Mayner Architects, in 2006. The building now houses the design department of the College of Visual and Performing Arts and the School of Architecture’s visiting critic studios, as well as a café and gallery on the ground floor. Garrison Architects completed a renovation of the main School of Architecture building, in 2008.
The presence of the 140,000-square-foot Warehouse space as an anchor of the Armory Square section of downtown Syracuse is an example of what Robbins calls “optimistic urbanism.” While it might seem as though nonprofit institutions gobbling up downtown real estate in a city that is starved for tax revenue is counter-intuitive, Robbins notes that the move turned out to be a catalyst for other development. Parcels have been bought up by private developers. A 300-person engineering firm, O’Brien & Gere, moved into a purpose-built building nearby that was developed by Pioneer Partners in 2010.
No recommended contents to display.