Architects, Developers, and Title 1

Architects, Developers, and Title 1

Architectural historian Marci Clark will draw on details of her recent dissertation on the collaboration of architect I.M. Pei and developer William Zeckendorf, Sr. and discuss their twelve-year partnership on two projects that began as Title 1 slum clearance sites, Kips Bay Towers and NYU’s University Village and Silver Towers. The high quality of design and execution of these publicly-assisted, middle-income housing complexes complicate the standard narrative of humdrum urban renewal in postwar New York. Columbia Professor Emerita of Real Estate Lynne Sagalyn will comment and moderate the Q & A.

Marci M. Clark is Director of Marketing & Communications for the JDS Development Group. In 2017, she completed her doctorate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, “I. M. Pei, William Zeckendorf, and the Architecture of Urban Renewal,” which reevaluates the practice of design and real estate in the United States through a case study of the collaboration of this architect-developer team.

Lynne B. Sagalyn, author of  Power at Ground Zero and Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon, was, until 2019,  Director of the MBA Real Estate Program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, where she remains Professor Emerita of Real Estate.