Sixty years ago New York City passed the NYC Landmarks Law, designed to protect the city’s historic and architectural heritage. Today the Landmarks Preservation Commission ensures the future of more than 38,000 buildings in five boroughs, along with scenic landmarks like Prospect Park, and unique historic neighborhoods or districts, like Greenwich Village.
In commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the passage of the Law, preservationist and historian Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel commissioned some of the most respected and innovative architectural critics, city planners, historians, scholars, and journalists to share their thoughts on sixty years of New York City preservation and its future. The essays are published in a volume titled Beyond Architecture: The New New York.
Join us as we explore the past, present, and future of historic preservation with two Beyond Architecture essayists, architect Vishaan Chakrabarti and landscape architect Lisa Switkin, whose contributions to transforming the city include projects like the High Line and the conversion of Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory.
Led in conversation by Jorge Otero-Pailos, Director and Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, they discuss what preserving the character of our city has meant, and what will merit protection in the future.
Participants
Vishaan Chakrabarti has over thirty years of experience investigating, designing, and implementing urban architecture and is the Founder and Creative Director of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism | PAU, where he leads the firm’s growing global portfolio of cultural, institutional, and public projects and also serves as the Thomas J. Baird Visiting Critic, Architecture at Cornell AAP. Chakrabarti’s past roles—including Principal at architecture firms SHoP Architects and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, President of the Moynihan Station Venture at the Related Companies, Director of the Manhattan Office for the New York Department of City Planning in the Bloomberg administration, and the William W. Wurster Dean of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley—have given him a uniquely well-rounded perspective on how cities and their architecture function and what they need to flourish.
While serving under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Chakrabarti successfully collaborated on the now-realized efforts to save the High Line, extend the #7 subway line, rebuild the East River Waterfront, expand the Columbia University campus, and reincorporate the street grid at the World Trade Center site after the events of 9/11. This deep-seated experience of implementing landmark urban designs under bureaucratic confines drives PAU’s innovative yet practical approach to creating vibrant, resilient, and cross-cultural urban environments that uplift the experience of everyday people.
PAU’s process begins with a search for emotional, social, and cultural connection, which inspires bespoke design solutions that deploy material, tectonics, light, and space to foster a sense of serendipity and community. Integral to PAU’s philosophy is developing a robust understanding of the daily lives of a diverse spectrum of urban dwellers, allowing the team to create multi-functional spaces that stimulate civic delight, promote environmental justice and cross-cultural pollination, and improve how people interact with the city and with each other. Current projects of note include the expansion of the I.M. Pei-designed Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, the planning and redevelopment of downtown Niagara Falls, and the conversion of the historic Domino Sugar Factory on Brooklyn’s waterfront into a contemporary office complex, to open this summer.
Chakrabarti is the author of the highly acclaimed book, A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America (Metropolis Books, 2013), and The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy (2024, Princeton University Press). He taught at Columbia for more than a decade and serves on the boards of the Architectural League of New York, the Regional Planning Association, the Norman Foster Foundation, The World Around and Prometheus Materials. Chakrabarti has degrees in architecture, urban planning, art history, and engineering. He was named the 2025 Edmund N. Bacon honoree for his visionary contributions to urban design and education.
Jorge Otero-Pailos is a Spanish-American artist, preservation architect, scholar, and educator renowned for pioneering experimental preservation practices. Alongside his artistic practice, he serves as Director and Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), where he also directs the Columbia Preservation Technology Lab and founded the first PhD program in Historic Preservation in the United States. He is a licensed architect who studied architecture at Cornell University and earned a doctorate in architecture from M.I.T.
His artworks have been commissioned by and exhibited at major heritage sites, museums, foundations, and biennials, including the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017), Artangel’s public art commission at the UK Parliament (2016), the V&A Museum (2015), and the 53rd Venice Art Biennale (2009). He is the recipient of the Roy Lichtenstein Visual Arts Residency at the American Academy in Rome (2021–22).
Otero-Pailos employs artistic methods—informed by advanced technologies, materials research, and interdisciplinary collaborations—to expand the range of objects valued as cultural heritage and to develop new ways of caring for those objects. His wide-ranging artistic practice finds expression through materials such as airborne atmospheric dust, smells, sounds, and architectural fragments. His series The Ethics of Dust (2008–ongoing) consists of large-scale latex casts made from the dust and pollution residues found on landmarked monuments, highlighting how sedimented dust functions as a repository of unexamined environmental histories and collective memories.
As a preservation architect, Otero-Pailos collaborates on the creative restoration and interpretation of landmark sites. Notably, he achieved award-winning restorations of New Holland Island in St. Petersburg, Russia, in partnership with WorkAC (2013), and the former U.S. Embassy in Oslo in collaboration with Langdalen Arkitektur (2023).
His contributions to the preservation of the Saarinen-designed landmark exemplify the intertwining of his artistic and preservation practices. As a preservationist, Otero-Pailos contributed to early advocacy efforts to save the Embassy and was later tasked with defining its preservation plan and overseeing the restoration of the original concrete facade. As an artist, he salvaged fragments of the building’s historic fence from landfill, transforming them into sculptures that were the subject of solo exhibitions on the malls of Park Avenue, New York, and at the National Museum of American Diplomacy in Washington, D.C. (2024).
Lisa Switkin is a recognized design leader and Partner at Field Operations, a leading-edge landscape architecture and urban design practice, where she leads many of the firm’s complex public realm projects. With a background in urban planning and landscape architecture, Lisa is committed to improving cities through the design of a resilient, holistic, and vibrant public realm, inspired by place, people, and nature. Throughout her career, Lisa has championed design and planning projects that creatively contend with complex issues related to social equity, climate change, and sustainable urbanism. She is known for her collaborative leadership style, thoughtful design sensibilities, and creative approach to public outreach and engagement.
For over 20 years, Lisa has been intimately involved in many multi-disciplinary projects including New York City’s High Line, Domino Park in Brooklyn, Santa Monica’s Tongva Park, Gansevoort Peninsula in Hudson River Park, the 1.5-mile-long River Balcony in Saint Paul, and the transformative master plans for Staten Island’s Freshkills Park, Shelby Farms Park in Memphis, The Underline in Miami, Waterfront Seattle, and most recently, Cleveland’s North Coast Master Plan. Other signature projects include Philadelphia’s Race Street Pier, Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis, Newark’s Riverfront Park, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Expansion in Cleveland, and the River Ring Master Plan in Brooklyn.
Lisa is a Past President of the Landscape Architecture Foundation and currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Urban Design Forum. In 2008, she was a Rome Prize recipient at the American Academy in Rome. She has a Bachelor of Urban Planning with a focus on Community Development Planning from the University of Illinois and a Master of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania. Lisa is a registered landscape architect in New York and has taught graduate level design studios and lectured at universities, symposiums, foundations, and institutions around the world.