User:Andrew MacNair

Andrew P. MacNair lives and works in New York City since 1971 when he came to the city from Washington and Princeton to study architecture in the graduate school at Columbia University. He studied with Richard Saul Wurman, Anthony Vidler, Michael Graves, Kenneth Frampton and did his master thesis on the reconstruction of the Central Park Zoo from a 19th century menagerie into a modern zoological garden. After Columbia, MacNair went to work with Haus-Rucker Co. on a government study, The Urban Oasis, on how to use the rooftops of New York in a green and ecological landscape. At the same time, he worked with Raimund Abraham on a design for a furniture system for Knoll and with Jaquelin T. Robertson.

Then he was invited in 1974 by Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, and Robert A.M. Stern to work at The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studieswhere he was the youngest Fellow and director of the Evening Program, the IAUS Exhibitions, the New Wave of Architecture series, the High School Program, and was a founding editor of the topical and popular little magazine called Skyline. MacNair left the Institute in 1980 when he edited and redesigned Oculus, the New York AIA magazine and at the same time founded what was to be a second version of Skyline which he and his partner Henry Hacker named Metropolis which became an entity of Bellerphon Publications owned by Horace Havemeyer. After founding of Metropolis, MacNair moved on to teach at Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute (where he was chairman of the B. Arch program), Cooper Union, Harvard University, the Berlage Institute, Columbia University, and the Central University of Venezuala, and the Parsons New School of Design.

MacNair has been involved for 40 years with several group practices as well as doing a private practice as an architect, teacher, painter, writer, and publisher. He has produced many research and design projects on New York City including one of the first studies in 1973 to save the then New York Central Railroad trestle (later the Highline), a study for the redesign of the Four Corners of Central Park, and projects to save and reuse the piers on the Hudson River waterfront. In private practice, MacNair has done a wide range of design work producing many local and international exhibitions, window designs, interiors for offices and showrooms, a series of tables, desks, chairs, and beds, several houses, many urban designs for towns and cities in Holland and Germany, and recently in construction a Dining Hall for a new Primary School 2,000 children in Heixi, China as well as a new pilgrimage Egg Chapel for the Hi Family Church in Seoul. S. Korea.

MacNair also has been deeply involved with several ongoing experimental projects including a 20 year study and teaching of Not Not Architecture which offers a critical and yet reconstructive alternative within what he sees as a limited field and he has worked for 32 years on Egg City, a long, slow kind of life’s work as an encompassing Merzbau.

He was raised in Swarthmore, Pa., attended high school at St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Del., studied and majored in architecture at Princeton University (A.B.), New Jersey; and did graduate study at Columbia University (M. Arch.), New York City.

Recently, MacNair and his wife, Johanna Post MacNair, are building an a pilgrimage Egg Chapel – Capella Ovi – for the Hi Family Church in Seoul, S. Korea as well as dining hall for 2,000 primary school children in Heixi, China. They have a daughter, Margaret Femke MacNair, and live on Central Park West in Manhattan.

He has shown drawings, paintings, and models in many group and solo exhibitions including exhibitions in New York, Amsterdam, Den Haag, Ghent, Stuttgart and recently at the Architecture for Art Gallery in Hillsdale, NY. He publishes and edits for 10 years an art and architecture magazine called Zapp Urbanism which is part the work of his Manhattan Studio. MacNair also currently is an editor with Steven Holl and Michael Bell of another little magazine between China and the US called 32BNY also for 10 years – both magazines were founded in response to the 911 attacks on the city.