Our dear friend Carl d’Alvia’s tribute to Jackie Saccoccio, and Jackie’s last gift to Carl
Upstate Diary documents the life, love, and art shared by this couple, and in turn, the house they built together. In dialogue with Laurie Simmons, Carl speaks to the life they shared, the challenges of this project, and the friendships that survive. With love from all of us to Carl, Jackie, and Maddalena!
“Looking back, many came into pedagogy with the need for and presumption of certainty. Now there is the confidence to embrace uncertainty—not only as a reflection of our changing times but as a pedagogical imperative to allow us to speculate, improvise, and rethink questions entirely.”
Jimmy Bullis and Pouya Khadem interview Nader for Rice Architecture’s PLAT 9.5 on equality, social justice, curriculum reform, personal manifestos, confluence in design, and the innate opportunities of translating drawings into buildings.
“One of my main questions to the academic community revolves around what the architectural discipline specifically brings to the table and how might it form our agency in a larger public conversation, whether in the halls of power, governance, or policy? How do we bring our particular mode of analysis to shed light on the policies and decisions that are made for society? There is probably not a square inch in the United States that is not the result of a spatial policy that is architectural in some way or another.”
Nader was interviewed outside the Arsenale at the Veneta Porta Lignea for Holcim‘s Building Conversations series where he discusses NADAAA’s explorations of urban planning, housing, and hybrid material systems for the 2021 Venice Biennale.
Find more of Holcim’s interviews of ‘architects inspiring us’ HERE.
The new NADAAA-designed Adams Street Branch Library has opened in the Adams Village neighborhood of Boston. We are so pleased to see this project completed for the Dorchester community!
Mayor Kim Janey and leadership from the Boston Public Library spoke at the opening on Saturday:
I am thrilled that the new and improved Adams Street branch will once again provide an accessible, inclusive place for the Dorchester community to gather, learn, and grow. My local library played a huge part in my upbringing. Libraries like the Adams Street branch continue to bring joy and essential services to residents of all ages.
– Mayor Kim Janey
We’re thrilled and we hope the community will be, too. The old branch was much-loved, but this completely new building certainly raises the bar.
– David Leonard, President, Boston Public Library
Local press on the Adams Street Branch opening:
The exterior of the 13,450-square-foot building is striking, its sharp angles finished with glazed terra cotta panels and copper. Inside, the space is brightened by floor-to-ceiling windows that offer substantial views of the surrounding neighborhoods, a lovely rock garden, and beyond to the Blue Hills. Overhead, the undulating ceiling is accented with wood-beam baffles meant to mimic the peaks of the roofs on neighboring homes.
FRANCESCO PAGLIARI writes: ‘The overall result is a multiple-feature architecture: multiple interrelated façades; abstract stereometric monumentality alongside homey light-filled interiors reaching out to connect with their surroundings: a sharp-angled monolith that is also an open, family-friendly holiday home. The striking materiality of these closed compact shapes is further accentuated by the use of unrendered concrete, the horizontal lines of the formwork still showing the veins and rough cut of the formwork, lending the manmade object an organic quality. The architecture is one with its terrain- its varied composition and natural color all dialogue with the landscape.’