CultureNOW | A Celebration of Culture & Community

Peter Gluck discusses the facade of the East Harlem School.  East Harlem, New York is a community beset by poverty and its attendant ills of early high school withdrawal, violent crime, teen pregnancy, and drug abuse. The East Harlem School is an independent, not-for-profit, year-round middle school that recruits students from low-income families in the community.  The school had an extremely tight budget, caused both by the high cost of construction that plagues inner-city schools and the fact that its site was within the 100-year flood zone. Peter Gluck and Partners acted as both architect and construction manager in an architect-led design-build process, providing a level of intensive quality control and substantial cost savings, which resulted in a building that would otherwise have been out of reach for such a school.

Peter Gluck discusses the institutional buildings his architectural team created in the inner city, most of which are in Harlem. 

Harvard professor David Fixler talks about the challenges he faced renovating Louis Kahn's iconic laboratory building. Richard Labs is one of the most iconic buildings of Modern Architecture, and transformative in Louis Kahn's architecture.  Kahn treated the scientists as artists separating the functional spaces into 'served' studios and 'servant', allowing natural light to penetrate into the laboratories which were arranged into a group of five towers.  He explored many of the technical constraints of the program and carefully detailed the exposed prestressed concrete structure and mechanical systems which had not really been done before.   

NYC artist Ross Lewis discusses his terrazzo floor painting, "Deep Water", located at the Holmesburg Recreation Center in Philadelphia.  Visitors to the Holmesburg Recreation Center trace the local topography and history in the abstract shapes of the terrazzo floor painting, Deep Water. The work represents for the artist the life which grew up around the Pennypack Creek and man's relationship to nature. A natural fall line, made Pennypack a tidal creek, giving early Holmesburg settlers a particular advantage for their water-power run saw mills and grist mills. The names of some of the early mills are included in the floor painting along with those of key streets such as Welsh Road, originally built by Welsh farmers to bring grain to the grist-mills back in the 1600's. Frankford Avenue, a north-south route retraces a route which is at least a thousand years old used by the Native American People. Other names in the painting of particular mention are the Crispin School, which stood on the current site of the Recreation Center, the Harrisburg Colored Settlement, one of the earliest black settlements in the area dating back to the 1720's and the King's Highway Bridge, the oldest stone bridge of its kind in the nation built in 1697.

Carol Berens, VP of the Empire State Development Corporation, the creation of the Piazza at Schmidts, a Romanesque shopping plaza built on reclaimed industrial land in Philadelphia. The Piazza at Schmidts is a Roman-style shopping plaza built on post-industrial land in Philadelphia. The buildings in the Piazza have received the American Institute of Architects' (AIA) most prestigious honors.

New York artist Joyce Kozloff discusses the inspiration for the Galla Placidia & Tobkapi Pullman mosaics. Two mosaics panels integrate local history with early moments in the history of Western art. In "Galla Placidia in Philadelphia." William Penn stands on a schematic hillside, holding the scrolled charter to the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He functions as an historical referent and schematic visual symbol, for his silhouette is the primary civic icon of the city.  Opposite the Penn mosaic stands "Topkapi Pullman," paying tribute to Philadelphia's role as a transportation and mercantile center. From inside Istanbul's Topkapi Palace, tiled with elaborate floral geometric motifs, a doorway opens up onto a massive, foreshortened locomotive speeding through a streamlined Precisionist space.

Historian James Kaplan discusses the historic Fraunces Tavern Museum, the location of Washington's farewell address to his troops.  The tavern remains today, owned by the Sons of the Revolution.

This podcast by historian and lawyer James Kaplan is the introduction to the July 4 all-night walking tour of Lower Manhattan: Celebrating New York City's Role in the Revolutionary War and Gravesites of Revolutionary War Generals.  James Kaplan begins with the history of pre-revolutionary New York.

At Bowling Green, historian James Kaplan talks about Evacuation Day, the departure of the British from New York City, and Charging Bull, a popular statue representing the spirit of Wall Street and American capitalism. 

250 Bowery sits amidst a hodgepodge of 19th and early 20th century commercial neighbors on the west side of the Bowery.  The facade is nearly square, with the width of the lot closely matching the 85’ maximum allowable height.  The building faces SANAA’s New Museum of Contemporary Art and Sir Norman Foster’s Sperone-Westwater Gallery.  The front and rear facades are clad in Alucobond aluminum-composite panels with floor-to-ceiling, factory-sash windows.  The facade responds to both the commercial history of the Bowery and the decidedly contemporary direction taken with recent construction in the neighborhood.  The interiors for the residences are open and lofty with spare and minimal detailing.  250 Bowery heralds change for a neighborhood that has been primarily commercial for generations and brings upscale living to a famously down-at-the-heels address.