The Architecture of Art and Performance

When it comes to culture and the performing arts, New York City’s institutions are estimable. The stages, museums, galleries and concert venues that are the homes to much of our large scale cultural enterprises each have their own histories, missions, design innovations and challenges. From the contours of the stage to the height of the ceilings to the siting of loading docks to the acoustics of an auditorium to the demands of new or not yet seen disciplines, every detail, element of planning and vision must reconcile themselves with the larger built environment of our city, institutional imperatives and budgets. The nexus of those considerations has a profound impact on the experience of both the audience and the artwork shown now and for generations.

On Wednesday, May 31, join the Downtown Alliance for a conversation about the crossroads of architecture, art and performance. Joshua Ramus of REX, Jaime Krone of the Guggenheim Foundation, David Rockwell of the Rockwell Group and Gregg Pasquarelli of SHoP Architects will speak with writer and architectural critic Paul Goldberger about their experiences with projects such as the Perelman Performing Arts Center, the Shed, Broadway, the Barclays Center, the Guggenheim Museum and more.

The conversation will conclude with a brief Q&A session and will be followed by a networking reception. This is a great opportunity to explore the complex relationship between design, place, presentation and performance, and how they can inform and inspire one another.

Speakers include:

• Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic and Joseph Urban Professor of Architecture at The New School
• Jaime Krone, Director, Exhibition Design and Architectural Strategic Planning, Guggenheim Foundation
• Gregg Pasquarelli, Founding Principal, SHoP Architects
• Joshua Ramus, Founding Principal, REX
• David Rockwell, President and Founder, Rockwell Group

Paul Goldberger, who The Huffington Post has called “the leading figure in architecture criticism,” is now a Contributing Editor at Vanity Fair. From 1997 through 2011 he served as the Architecture Critic for The New Yorker, where he wrote the magazine’s celebrated “Sky Line” column. He is the author of numerous books, including BALLPARK: Baseball in the American City, published in 2019 by Alfred A. Knopf; Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, published in 2015 by Knopf, and also of Building with History, published by Prestel; Why Architecture Matters, published by Yale University Press; Building Up and Tearing Down, a collection of his articles from The New Yorker published by Monacelli; and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, published by Taschen. His latest book, DUMBO: The Making of a Neighborhood and the Rebirth of Brooklyn, was published in 2021 by Rizzoli, and Yale University Press published a new revised edition of Why Architecture Matters in 2023. He also holds the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture at The New School in New York City and was formerly Dean of the Parsons School of Design at The New School.

He began his career at The New York Times, where in 1984 his architecture criticism was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, the highest award in journalism. In 2012 he received the Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum in recognition of the influence his writing has had on the public’s understanding of architecture. In 2017, he received the Award in Architecture of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which called him “the doyen of American architectural critics.” He lectures widely around the country on architecture, design, historic preservation, and cities, and has appeared in numerous films and television programs as a commentator on architecture. He served as an advisor on architect selection and project design for numerous non-profit institutions including The Obama Presidential Center, The New York Public Library, The Morgan Library, Harvard University, Lincoln Center, Cornell University, the Carnegie Science Center, The Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Glenstone Museum; for public agencies such as the Empire State Development Corporation, where he advised on the design for the Moynihan Train Hall project in New York City, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, where he served as an advisor on design matters connected to the redevelopment of LaGuardia Airport. He has also advised corporate clients including Google, Sothebys Inc., Tiffany, the Howard Hughes Corporation and the New York Islanders.

He is chairman of the Advisory Council of The Glass House, a property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of Kenyon College. He is also a member of the boards of the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, the Urban Design Forum, and the New York Stem Cell Foundation, and is an emeritus trustee of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He was married to Susan Solomon, chief executive officer of The New York Stem Cell Foundation, until her death in September 2022. They are the parents of three sons and six grandchildren. He resides in New York City and Amagansett, New York.

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Over the past 20 years, Jaime Krone has led exhibition design projects at multiple prominent museums. She currently serves as the Senior Director, Exhibition Design and Architectural Strategic Planning at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York where she has designed and helped produce acclaimed exhibitions such as Alex Katz: Gathering; Countryside, The Future; James Turrell; Maurizio Cattelan: All; and On Kawara—Silence. While at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she worked closely with OMA to produce Manus X Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology and managed production of all in-house exhibitions. She began her career in exhibition design at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Jaime considers the role of an exhibition designer as a caretaker of ideas, helping transition a poetic vision or narrative thoughtfully into a physical, transformative, and holistic experience. She especially enjoys collaborating with artists and curators on site-specific installations, where the dialogue between artwork and architecture becomes a new voice contributing to the ways in which we are impacted by art.

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Gregg Pasquarelli is a founding principal of SHoP Architects. He has been at the center of a collaborative and innovative practice in creating new models for design, master planning and real estate development. Gregg has led many of the firm’s most complex and dynamic projects, including in New York, The Porter House, Barclays Center, the East River Waterfront Esplanade, Pier 17, the American Copper Buildings and the skyline-defining supertalls 111 West 57th Street and The Brooklyn Tower. His global work includes the new Fulbright University Vietnam, GoCo Active in Sweden, new towers in Rotterdam, Miami, Toronto, New Delhi, and Batumi. Gregg has been a professor of architecture for more than 20 years at Columbia, Yale, and UVA. He received his Master’s of Architecture from Columbia University in 1994. Gregg is a Fellow of the AIA and a lifetime honoree Academician in the National Academy of Design.

The diverse and trendsetting work of SHoP has been widely celebrated with a variety of honors, among them the Smithsonian’s National Design Award for Architecture, the Chicago Atheneum’s Firm of the Year Award, and their designs are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

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REX’s founding principal, Joshua Ramus leads the firm’s think-tank of diverse professionals and remains intimately involved in all the office’s work. Ramus was the first American recipient of the Marcus Prize, the biennial, international architecture award conferred by the Marcus Corporation Foundation and the University of Wisconsin, and has been honored by the

experimental performance company STREB with their Action Maverick Award. He has also been credited as one of the “5 greatest architects under 50” by HuffPost; the world’s most influential young architects by Wallpaper*; the twenty most influential players in design by Fast Company; “The 20 Essential Young Architects” by ICON magazine; and the “Best and Brightest” by Esquire.

Ramus has been Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor at Yale University, Cullinan Visiting Professor at Rice University, and a visiting professor at Columbia University, The Cooper Union, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Syracuse University. An early member of the TED Advisory Board, Ramus shared REX’s design methodologies at TED and TEDxSMU conferences, and lectures frequently at universities, cultural institutions, and symposiums around the world.

Ramus holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard University, where he earned the inaugural Araldo Cossutta Fellowship and the SOM Fellowship, and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, magna cum laude with distinction in the major, from Yale University. He is NCARB Certified and a registered architect in states throughout the U.S. and Australia, as well as in The Netherlands.

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David Rockwell, FAIA is the founder and President of Rockwell Group, a 300-person cross-disciplinary architecture and design firm based in New York with offices in Los Angeles and Madrid. Growing up in the United States and Guadalajara, Mexico, David was a child of the theater, and was often cast in community repertory productions by his mother, a vaudeville dancer and choreographer. His sensibility is informed by both a lifelong passion for all things theatrical and an aesthetic appreciation for Mexican color and spectacle. Through this unique lens, he founded Rockwell Group in 1984. Merging theater, performance, and architecture to create unique narratives for each project, the firm’s work includes hotels and restaurants, theaters, cultural and educational institutions, set designs, products, exhibitions, and urban interventions that engage the public realm.

Current and recent projects include The Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York (Restaurant and Lobby Interior Architect); 555 Pennsylvania Avenue and Hopkins Student Center for Johns Hopkins University (Washington, D.C. and Baltimore); Fotografiska (Miami); Coqodaq (New York); One Madison Avenue (New York); CIVILIAN Hotel (New York); Zaytinya (New York); 550 Madison (New York); FUTURES, an exhibition spotlighting the Smithsonian’s 175th anniversary; and the pro bono OpenStage, DineOut, and Stoop NYC initiatives. David Rockwell’s latest book, DRAMA, developed in collaboration with designer Bruce Mau was published by Phaidon in May 2021.