Graduate Student’s Essay Receives Avery Review Award

Pedro Piñera Rodriguez’s essay, “No More Fantasies: Design Realities for a Strip of the West Side,” has received an Honorable Mention in the 2019 Avery Review Essay Prize competition.

Pedro is a graduate student pursuing the Master of Architecture I degree. His essay, which was written for an Independent Study that he took with Dr. Lidia Klein this semester, was selected from among 100 submissions to the Avery Review. Hosted by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, the Avery Review is an online journal dedicated to critical thought about books, buildings, and other architectural media.

Pedro’s essay looks at two new cultural structures in the Hudson Yards area of Manhattan: The Vessel and The Shed. In a public release, the Avery Review praised Pedro’s essay “for expanding on The Shed’s claims to the legacy of Cedric Price’s Fun Palace and for asking vital questions about the possibility of critical public intervention within architectural developments that remake the city according to the dictums of finance.”