Cocktails & Conversation: Peter Gluck and Inga Saffron

How do you spend Friday evening? Do you join those jamming NYC’s cultural institutions or those crowds over populating film theaters? When it hosts a pair of NYC’s most interesting and provocatively creative thinkers, the Center for Architecture—one of NYC’s premiere cultural institutions—can certainly lift your spirits. This series of dialogues about design joins an architect with a critic, journalist, curator, or architectural historian to discuss current architecture design issues. Friday night is not “Friday Night” without the appropriate beverage. We’ll provide a custom-crafted cocktail—one inspired by the architect’s work and created especially for this event. Join us in growing the tradition of Delight Night in New York’s Weekend Cultural Scene—Blight Night it is not.

Speakers: 
Peter Gluck, Founder and Principal, GLUCK+
Inga Saffron, Architecture Critic, Philly Inquirer

Peter L. Gluck is founder and principal of GLUCK+ in New York. For over 40 years, the practice has committed to crafting bold, innovative and conceptually unique architecture. The firm’s work is diverse and consistently recognized through national and international design awards and publications. Most work is constructed by the firm through their unique approach to Architect Led Design Build (ALDB). In 2014, Fast Company‘s “World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Architecture” list included GLUCK+ “for taking control of the entire building process.” GLUCK+ was featured in The Architectural League of New York’s Current Work lecture series with the presentation: “thinking making making thinking”.

Recent projects include Bridge, a high-rise development in Old City, Philadelphia; Duke University Marine Lab’s new LEED Gold oceanographic science research lab building; and a private Artist Retreat in upstate New York. GLUCK+ also designed and built the award-winning Cary Leeds Center for Tennis & Learning, a public/private initiative in Crotona Park, Bronx, which The New York Times hailed in April 2017 as “one of the city’s best new works of public architecture.”

Inga Saffron is the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Since 1999, she has written a weekly column called Changing Skyline that offers an insightful look at the urban design issues facing Philadelphia. She is the winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism and has been a finalist three times since 2004. Inga spent the 2011-12 academic year as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, exploring issues relating to place-making, alternative transportation and rammed-earth construction. Her writing has appeared in the New Republic, Metropolis, Dwell Landscape Architecture Magazine, Texas Architecture and the Architects Newspaper. Before becoming the paper’s architecture critic, she spent the 1990s as a foreign correspondent for the Inquirer in Russia and the former Yugoslavia, covering wars in Bosnia and Chechnya and witnessing the destruction of Sarajevo and Grozny. 

Organized by: AIANY Architecture Dialogue Committee