Research

  • The Egg and The Extrusion
  • GRANTEE
    Kyle May & Julia van den Hout
    GRANT YEAR
    2014

Wallace K. Harrison, The Anchorage, 1941, Mt. Desert, ME. Photo: Kyle May.

Throughout his career, Wallace K. Harrison designed many of New York's most iconic buildings and was one of the top published American architects in the 1950s, but his body of work has only been examined once—in Victoria Newhouse's 1989 monograph. Since this publication, the architect has been virtually ignored. The Egg and The Extrusion offers a new examination of the work of Harrison, opening a critical perspective on American architecture from the mid-twentieth century to the present. From benefactors and patronage to structural and material innovation, as well as iconicity, this study traces themes prevalent in the last half-century of architecture, as understood through the lens of Harrison's oeuvre. At the same time, this project excavates the range of one man's work—from corporate and commercial towers to private, cultural, and religious structures—and the influence his work has had on some of today's greatest architects.

Kyle May is a practicing architect in New York City, and cofounder and editor-in-chief of CLOG. He received his MArch from Kent State University, and worked at REX, Openshop|Studio, FACE Design + Fabrication, and Rogers Marvel Architects. He is registered in New York and Ohio. May has been a visiting critic at Harvard GSD, Princeton University, Columbia University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Syracuse University, Kent State University, City College of New York, and New York City College of Technology; and has lectured at Yale, MIT, NYU, Barnard, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Kent State University, KTH Stockholm and Lund University. He has worked on preservation and renovation proposals for Wallace Harrison's Hopkins Center at Dartmouth, the Hall Auditorium at Oberlin College, and the McGraw-Hill and Time Life buildings at Rockefeller Center.

Julia van den Hout is founder of Original Copy, a communications office that specializes in editorial, curatorial and research projects. She is also cofounder and editor of CLOG, a quarterly architecture publication that aims to slow down the rapid pace of architectural discourse and provide a platform for discussion of one topic at a time. From 2008 to 2014, she was director of press and marketing at Steven Holl Architects, where she was responsible for developing and coordinating the communications strategy for over thirty projects and competitions, organizing the opening and publication of more than ten completed projects, and the coordination of multiple travelling exhibitions. In 2012, Julia received an MFA in design criticism from the School of Visual Arts, and she holds a BA in art history and urban design and architecture from NYU. Her writing has been published in The Architectural Review, Domus, Oculus, C3, and Fernando Romero's monograph, You Are The Context.

Alongside the thirteen CLOG issues published thus far, May and van den Hout have organized events, and lectures in New York, Boston, Miami, and Chicago, and recently curated the exhibition New Views: The Rendered Image in Architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition, they have been actively involved at Wallace Harrison's First Presbyterian Church in Stamford, CT as part of the Fish Church Conservancy, where they have organized tours and events at the church for Docomomo US and are currently working on a National Historic Landmark application.