We are sad to report that longtime board member, mentor and nationally recognized journalist and writer, Grady Clay, passed away on March 17 in Louisville, Kentucky. Grady was instrumental in helping to establish The Competition Project, and, subsequently, COMPETITIONS as a quarterly magazine. It was with his continued support and encouragement that we were able to establish our publication and place in reporting on the national and international state of competitions. Grady made things easy for us from the very beginning, getting an interview with landscape architect, George Hargreaves for our very first issue. Whenever any question arose about an article, or a suitable headline, Grady was always there to pass on his invaluable advice.
Clay grew up in Atlanta, earning a bachelor’s degree from Emory University. After gaining his masters in journalism from Columbia University he hitch-hiked to Louisville in 1939 for a job interview with the Louisville Times. His first job as a reporter brought him $25 a week. In 1942, he joined the Army and soon became the distribution officer of the European Edition of Yank Magazine, a job he got because of his rotogravure experience at the Courier-Journal. He received a purple heart at Anzio due to a shell fragment. One of his favorite stories involved his getting into Rome and successfully requisitioning the paper supply of the Vatican.
Returning to the Courier, he was the real estate editor and the urban affairs editor until 1966. During this time he was honored by a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard in 1948-49, studying mostly with historians and landscape architects. He became the editor of Landscape Architecture magazine, and continued as an author into his 90s. His sonorous, Georgia-accented voice was known widely from his weekly radio commentary “Crossing the American Grain” on local public radio.
Grady authored five books, a stack of articles 30 inches high, and innumerable pieces in the Louisville Times, Courier-Journal and Landscape Architecture. With his combination of vast knowledge and polite persuasion, he was elected the president of the National Association of Real Estate Editors and later the National Association of Planning Officials. The American Society of Landscape Architects awarded him the Olmsted Medal in 1999 and the Bradford Williams Medal (for writing) in 2006.
He touched the lives of many Americans by chairing the selection committee for the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, whose powerful statement he vigorously defended in an era of controversy. He also chaired the Kent State Memorial selection committee and was a design juror numerous competitions, including the Olympia Fields Mitchell Park competition, Williamsburg planning competition, and numerous others. Most of Grady’s journals and other papers going back to 1939 are in the archives of the Loeb Library at Harvard, the majority having been digitized.
If cities in the U.S. are anticipating funding from government entities to solve a dire need for affordable housing, they should be prepared for a long wait. The national government, a traditional source of funds for such projects, has shown little if no interest in the issue, and state and local sources are at a minimum. To exacerbate the problem, the construction cost of affordable housing has risen exponentially the the past few decades. Gone are those days when architects such as Oakland-based Michael Pyatok could build affordable housing for $100 a square foot.
Form and Dichroic Light Scott Hall at Carnegie Mellon University Michelle LaFoe and Isaac Campbell OFFICE 52 Architecture Forward by Cesar Pelli, FAIA Introduction by Michael J. Crosbie, FAIA Leete”s Island Books, Maine USA Hard cover; 96 pages in color ISBN 9780918172709
In his introduction to Form and Dichroic LIght, Michael Crosbie never mentions the term, “wild card,” to describe Office 52’s participation in the invited competition for the Carnegie Mellon Engineering Building. The four finalists, picked from a list of 17 firms, also included three household names: ZGF, Wilson, and BCJ (Bohlin Cywinski, Jackson). So what possible chance could a firm, which had just recently opened a small office in Portland, Oregon, have against a competition lineup of this magnitude? But as OFFICE 52 Principal, Isaac Campbell explained, as a small firm, “we were quite nimble,” and the $50,000 stipend the firms all received to produce a design could allow OFFICE 52 more time to undertake the research involved than might be the case with a larger office, where a cost controller is constantly focusing on the operation.
The Rails to Trails program, which gained momentum after the1984 Federal Land Banking Law—supported by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy—has seen over 24,000 miles of trails established where rail lines once existed. Some sites were strictly urban, while others, sometimes over 100 miles in length, were primarily rural, while others combined some of both.
The reunification of Germany in 1989 not only had a great impact on the lives of many Germans, especially those living in the former DDR,but together with the decision to move the nation’s capital from Bonn to Berlin resulted in two major international design competitions in 1992: the first was to convert the existing Reichstag building into a home for the German parliament, the second being the Spreebogen planning competition, which included a chancellery for the head of state as well as needed buildings nearby for the Federal government.
The renovation of Miremont-le-Cret n 2012 was unusual in that the project was the subject of a competition. This building had long been landmarked as one of Geneva’s most significant modern accomplishments, designed in 1953 by a local architect, Marc-Joseph Saugey. The building’s design is remarkable in how it fits into a somewhat narrow, elongated site, but solving the issue of monotony that could naturally arise had the facades not consisted of a simple elevation with no protruding edges. Instead Saugey came up with the idea of a faceted treatment of the facade on both sides of the structure, thus eliminating any notion of boredom on the part of a casual visitor.
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