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James Sanders (architect)

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James Sanders

James Sanders (born 11 June 1955) is an architect, author, and filmmaker in New York City, whose work has garnered him a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Emmy Award, among other honors.

Biography

James Sanders, AIA, is a graduate of Columbia College (where he received the 1976 Chanler Prize in History) and Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and attended the MIT School of Architecture + Planning. Since 1985 he has been principal of James Sanders Studio, an architecture, design and research studio located in New York City. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (Fellows Page, 2006) in 2006 for research on the experience of cities, and grants and fellowships from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, and Furthermore, a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund. In 2013 he was appointed Senior Fellow at the Center for Urban Real Estate in Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, to direct a joint research and conference initiative called Building the Digital City: Tech and the Transformation of New York.

Mr. Sanders co-founded the Architectural League's Prize Competition for young architects and designers, is a member of the American Institute of Architects, the Century Association, and the Writers Guild of America/East, is a Fellow at the Forum for Urban Design, and sits on the board of trustees of the Skyscraper Museum.

Since 2016 Mr. Sanders has served as Global Design Council Chairman and design consultant for the architecture firm, Woods Bagot.

Architecture and Urban Design

Mr. Sanders' architecture, urban design, and development strategy projects include the Seaport Culture District, a coordinated program of seven installations in re-imagined indoor and outdoor spaces stretching across the South Street Seaport in Manhattan, sponsored by The Howard Hughes Corporation and activated by ten New York cultural partners including the AIA/NY Center for Architecture, Guggenheim Museum, American Institute of Graphic Arts/NY Chapter, Eyebeam, HarperCollins, Parsons School of Design, Arup, No Longer Empty, and Art Start; NYU Open House, a public event space and cultural center in Greenwich Village for New York University, "Seaport Past & Future" for General Growth Properties, and projects for the Related Companies, André Balazs Properties, South Street Seaport Museum, Ian Schrager Company, the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, the Pershing Square Management Association in Los Angeles, and the Parks Council, where in the early 1980s he co-designed and co-developed the coordinated series of amenities—bookmarket, flower market, cafes—that initiated the revitalization of Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan, an effort described by MIT's Susan Silberberg as “one of the most dramatic examples of successful place-making in the last half century.”

Mr. Sanders' residential, commercial, and cultural design projects, for clients including New Yorker magazine editor Bill Buford, the late Columbia professor Edward Said, and the actress Molly Ringwald, have been featured in Interiors, Oculus, The Architect's Newspaper, The New Yorker, House Beautiful, The New York Times, and Architectural Digest, and have been exhibited at the Skyscraper Museum and the Museum of the City of New York.

In June 2018, a design proposal for the Adelaide Contemporary, a new $250 million museum complex for South Australia, on which Mr. Sanders collaborated with Woods Bagot and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, was selected as the winning entry in an international architectural competition.

Celluloid Skyline and Other Books

In 2001, Sanders published a landmark study on the relationship of the city and film, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies (Knopf, 2001, Bloomsbury UK, 2002), which received an award from the Theatre Library Association in 2002 and was called a "marvellous -- miraculous -- book" by the urbanist Jane Jacobs. In 2007, the book became the basis for a large-scale multimedia exhibition in Grand Central Terminal, co-designed by Sanders with Pentagram, and sponsored by Turner Classic Movies and Time Warner Cable (see video in Monocle).

Sanders’ most book, Scenes from the City: Filmmaking in New York, produced with the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, featuring contributions by Martin Scorsese and Nora Ephron, was originally published by Rizzoli in 2006; a revised and expanded edition was published in Spring 2014. He is currently editing his newest book, Renewing the Dream: From Parking to Places in Southern California, designed by Pentagram and sponsored by Woods Bagot, to be published in 2021.

Documentary Films

Sanders co-conceived and co-wrote (with Ric Burns) the award-winning PBS series, New York: A Documentary Film, and its bestselling companion volume, New York: An Illustrated History(Knopf, 1999). Described by Variety as “nothing short of gripping…a monumental documentary series that raises the bar for this kind of work,” the eight-part, 17½-hour film series chronicles the city's rise from tiny Dutch trading post through its preeminence as economic and cultural capital of the world. The series won several Emmy Awards and a Columbia-Dupont award. Mr. Sanders and Mr. Burns are currently producing a new ninth episode of the series, entitled "The Future of Cities," with funding provided by the American Express Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others, for national public television broadcast in Fall 2020.

With Burns, Sanders co-wrote Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, for which he received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Non-Fiction Writing in 2007.

Exhibits and Multimedia Projects

In addition to the 2007 "Celluloid Skyline" installation in Grand Central, Mr. Sanders has created several major exhibit and multimedia installations, including "Timescapes," the permanent orientation installation at the Museum of the City of New York (created with Local Projects, and narrated by Stanley Tucci), "An American Synagogue" (produced by Picture Projects, and narrated by Leonard Nimoy) at Beth Sholom Synagogue in Elkins Park, PA, "Seaport Past and Future," at the South Street Seaport, and the "Celluloid Skyline" website, which was called "the most beautiful website about New York" by Manhattan Users Guide (MUG.com). His 1975 exhibition "Three Buildings," sponsored by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission and held at the CUNY Graduate Center, explored the architecture and urbanism of Grand Central Terminal, the New York Public Library, and the Times Tower. In her review, the New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable described it as "a model of what such an exhibition should be...I don't know when I've seen a better architecture show in a more appropriate setting."

Articles & Essays

Sanders is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and has written articles and essays for The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, and Architectural Record, and co-wrote New York City’s official bid book for the 2012 Olympic Games.

Bibliography

  • New York: An Illustrated History (with Ric Burns). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Revised and Expanded Ed. 2003. Munich: Frederking & Thaler, 2002.
  • Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. London: Bloomsbury, 2002.
  • Scenes from the City: Filmmaking in New York. New York: Rizzoli, 2006. Revised and Expanded Edition, 2013
  • Renewing the Dream: From Parking to Places in Southern California. (In Preparation)

Filmography

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