Independent Projects
Grant Opportunities and Artist’s Residency Programs for Architects & Designers Sponsored by The Architectural League
Introduction by Anne Van Ingen
Presentations by Margaret Morton and Georgeen Theodore
Anne Van Ingen, Director, Architecture, Planning & Design Program and Capital Projects, New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) introduced the program by outlining this year’s grant application process. Two past winners of League-sponsored NYSCA grants presented their research. Margaret Morton discussed her project The Muslim Cemeteries of Kyrgyzstan. Georgeen Theodore presented her project NORCS (Naturally Occurring Retirement Community) in NYC.
To apply for Independent Projects grant, applicants must submit through a non-profit. The League invites anyone to apply. This year’s NYSCA Independent Projects deadline is January 26, 2010. For more information on League sponsorship of your project, contact Anne Rieselbach. For more information on the NYSCA grant application process, click here.
Margaret Morton discussed her photographic book, The Muslim Cemeteries of Kyrgyzstan, which explores Kyrgyzstan’s extensive and architecturally unique cemeteries, which are ornate miniature cities. Kyrgyz nomads, often described as having left behind no great monuments or books, left behind a magnificent architectural legacy when they buried their dead. Her website Cities of the Dead: Kyrgyzstan contains pictures and a history of the cemetary.
Morton received her MFA from Yale University School of Art and is a fulltime professor in the School of Art at The Cooper Union. Morton’s photographs, oral histories, and texts have been published in four books: Glass House, Fragile Dwelling, The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City, and Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives [co-authored with Diana Balmori]. Morton’s photographs have been exhibited in over 25 solo and 50 group exhibitions, and published internationally.
NORC stands for Naturally Occurring Retirement Community. For example, a Co-op Village in NYC is a NORC because 4,060 of its residents are over 60, even though none of the buildings that make up Co-op Village were “purpose-built” as retirement communities. Georgeen Theodore of Interboro presented research on New York’s 27 NORCs, housing around fifty thousand residents and their implications on urban design. The NORC project team additionally included: Tobias Armborst (Principal, Interboro), Daniel D’Oca (Principal, Interboro), Ondine Masson, Hilla Rudanko, and Alec Schierenbeck.
Georgeen Theodore is an architect, urban designer, and Assistant Professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture and Design, where she is the Associate Director of the Infrastructure Planning program. She is a founding partner and principal of Interboro, a New York City-based architecture and planning research office. Recent work includes completing “LentSpace,” a temporary outdoor cultural space in New York City, curating “Community,” the American portion of the 2009 Rotterdam Architecture Biennale, and creating the first neighborhood redevelopment plan of the Booker administration in Newark, New Jersey.
This program was made possible in part by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
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