Davis Brody Bond's Greatest Hits, 1958-1995

DBB DNA:
GREATEST HITS 1958–1995

HOSTED BY DESIGN DIALOGUES • JULY 2019

As part of the firm’s continuing “Design Dialogues” series, we pored through the project archive — including featured work from the firm’s 60-year anniversary exhibit at its Hudson Street office in 2011 — to create a presentation to new staff and visitors of ten of the firm’s award-winning, stylistically interesting, socially important, and/or visually compelling projects from the second half of the 20th century. Elizabeth Frenchman, the firm’s former resource librarian, termed these projects “DBB DNA,” in that they still inform the firm’s character, spirit, and cultural knowledge, even if many of the people involved in the projects no longer work at the firm.

Projects presented range from the mid-century residential projects of Davis, Brody and Associates, to synagogues and schools; to increasingly large-scale projects like the brutalist student center at SUNY New Paltz (1966) and the groundbreaking urban housing developments Riverbend (1967) and Waterside (1974), designed for the developer Richard Ravitch; to the US Pavilion for EXPO’70 in Osaka, a marvel of engineering and design, developed with exhibit designers Chermayeff and Geismar; to Max Bond’s design of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Upper Manhattan. The presentation concluded with a discussion of the the firm’s World Trade Center Public Spaces Master Plan, developed in 1995, six years before the tragic events of 9-11 brought us back to the site.