People Talking About Architecture – 03.03.2006

Cambridge:
Patrick Berger - MILIEUX
6:00 PM - SHARE, Consulate of Switzerland (420 Broadway)
Pascal at SHARE wrote to tell of Mr. Berger's lecture, where he will share his perspective on the city and its natural environment and focus on structures and materials. He will also describe his vision of planning strategy to design building with ties to the city.

University of California – Berkley:
Symposium - Thinking/Drawing: Drawing in an Electronic Age
(March 3 & 4) 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM - 112 Wurster Hall
The Symposium is a two-day examination of the need and role for drawing today in the design professions and fine arts. Organized by architecture professor Marc Treib, the program will broadly address the question “Why draw?” by variously examining the dynamic relationships between media, process, thought and environment. Presenting papers and/or their work will be: Errol Barron, Professor of Architecture, Tulane University; Christopher Brown, Adjunct Professor of Painting, California College of the Arts; Catherine Dee, Senior Lecturer in Landscape Architecture, University of Sheffield; Anthony Dubovsky, Professor of Visual Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Christopher Grubbs, Architectural Illustrator; San Francisco; Lynn Gumpert, Director, Grey Art Gallery, New York University; Katie Hawkinson, Lecturer in Visual Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Mark Hewitt, Architect and Adjunct Professor of Art History, Rutgers University; Harley Jessup, Pixar Animation Studios, Emeryville; Laurie Olin, Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Pennsylvania; Chip Sullivan, Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of California, Berkeley; and Marc Treib.

People Talking About Architecture – 03.02.2006

New York:
Architectural League : Emerging Voices 2006
6:30 - Scholastic Auditorium (557 Broadway)
Join Eric Bunge & Mimi Hoang of nARCHITECTS in New York, and Teddy Cruz of estudio teddy cruz in San Diego, for discussion and award presentations.

Toronto:
Chris Wilkinson – (Untitled Lecture)
6:00 PM - "The Pit" of the Architectural Science Building (325 Church Street)
The principal of Wilkinson Eyre Architects will speak.

People Talking About Architecture – 03.01.2006

JCC of West Orange:
Daniel Libeskind - Breaking Ground
7:30 - Maurice Levin Theater (760 Northfield Ave. West Orange, NJ)
Mr. Leibeskind will speak to the organization that meets the needs of the 10th largest Jewish community in the nation.

Columbia University:
Will Alsop - The Behaviour of the Architect
6:30 PM - Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall
The audience may not detect cultural misspellings like “behaviour” in the prepared speech from the principal of Alsop Architects.

Sarycuse University:
David Erdman – “network in_formation”
4:30 PM - The Warehouse, Main Auditorium
The professor at UCLA Architecture School, and principal of Servo will speak about recent work.

Sci-ARC:
Discussion - (Dis)Educating Architects in Zürich
7:00 PM – Main Space
Dr. Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, and Prof. Andrea Deplazeswill be in conversation with Eric Owen Moss and Dr. Oya Atalay Franck.

Chicago:
Lee Bey - The Politics of Architecture and the Architecture of Politics:
6:00 PM - ArcheWorks
The full title of the lecture is The Politics of Architecture and the Architecture of Politics: How Aldermen, Civic Groups— and Mayors—Shape the Built Environment. Lee Bey is not an architect, but from 2001 to 2004, he served as the deputy chief of staff for planning and design for Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. In that role, he helped shape local policy on urban development, lakefront protection, park construction, sustainable design and architectural preservation.

People Talking About Architecture – 02.28.2006

Columbia University:
Rem Koolhaas - The Lagos Project
4:00 PM - Wood Auditorium (113 Avery Hall)
Or
Peter Testa - Rethinking Systems
6:30 pm - 111 East 59th Street
(It’s hard to figure out which is which… here.)

Cornell University:
Rickard Burdett - Urban Transformations in London
6:30 PM - Hollis Cornell Auditorium (Goldwin Smith Hall)

Harvard University:
Byoung Cho – (Untitled Lecture)
6:00 PM - Gund Hall Piper Auditorium
Byoungsoo Cho will be giving a home-turf lecture.

Massachusetts Institutute of Technology:
Bruce Lindsey & Andrew Freear - Rural Studio & Collective Practice
6:30 PM - Room 10-250
The Co-Directors of the Rural Studio at Auburn University will give a talk whose full title is Rural Studio & Collective Practice: Reconnaissance at the Social and Environmental Edge.

Architectural Association:
Zaha Hadid/Hanif Kara - The Design of the Phaeno Centre
6:30 PM - - Lecture Hall (36 Bedford Square, London)
To open the AA exhibition of the project, both Ms. Hadid and Mr. Hanif will present the architecture and engineering of the Phaeno Science Centre, in the motor city of Wolfsburg. The evening's presentation will provide insight into the architectural and engineering ideas that are at the core of the project. (The realization of the project will be described more fully two nights later with a more technical presentations by the project architects and engineers who carried out the design development and construction of the building within the offices of Zaha Hadid Architects and Adams Kara Taylor.)

University of Toronto:
Raoul Bunschoten - From Matter to Metaspace
6:30 PM - Room 103
The principal of CHORA, in London will present favorite projects.

People Talking About Architecture – 02.27.2006

Uinversity of California, Berkley:
Thomas Sieverts - “Soft” Regional Management Strategies
7:00 PM - 112 Wurster Hall
The Professor Emeritus of the Darmstadt Institute of Technology, will deliver a lecture whose full title is “Soft” Regional Management Strategies A Collaborative Approach to Regional Design & Planning and whose subject is will address regional design and planning concepts used for the RuhrDistrict region in Germany, and Vision Bern, Switzerland. He is the author of Cities without Cities.

University of Florida:
Marc Mimram – (Untitled Lecture)
6 p.m. - UF Harn Museum of Art auditorium
The French engineer will speak about favorite projects.

Washington University:
Antoine Picon – (Untitled Lecture)
7:00 PM - Steinberg Auditorium
Antoine Picon is professor of the History of Architecture and Technology and Director of Doctoral Programs at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

California College for the Arts:
Stephen Cassell - Architecture Research Office (ARO)
7:00 PM - Timken Lecture Hall (San Francisco campus)
ARO was established in 1993 by Stephen Cassell and Adam Yarinsky. Their work has become a model for research-driven architectural practice, as each project evolves out of a deep engagement with specific physical, social, and economic conditions.

New York:
Discussion - Obsession and Practice
6:00 PM - Titus 2 Auditorium (MoMA)
In collaboration with the American Folk Art Museum’s exhibition Obsessive Drawing, MoMA will present an interdisciplinary panel that investigates the repetitive, detail-oriented creative practices of artists, writers, and performers. Panelists include artists Trenton Doyle Hancock and Daniel Zeller, poet Susan Howe, and musician David Grubbs. Moderated by Brooke Davis Anderson, curator of Obsessive Drawing.

Ottawa:
Massimiliano Fuksas - (Untitled Lecture)
6:00 PM - National Gallery of Canada Main Body (380 Sussex Drive in Ottawa.)

Sforzinda and Levittown

With mass production and the industrial revolution came mechanized travel, warfare, and production. When the construction industry became standardized and mechanized, America got it’s first tangible look at the sublime limitless space implied by tract housing landscapes. (Here BldgBlog spotlights a photographer whom has done some frightening work documenting seemingly limitless rows of these things.) One would think that this is a problem unique to modern time: that it was a dystopia first dealt with recently because it is uniquely the byproduct of the machine age.

Much to the contrary, Hanno-Walter Kruft documents renaissance thought on the subject his book "A History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present." There in Chapter Three, he has a remarkable paragraph about renaissance architectural theoretician Antonio Averlino’s (Filarete) view on repetitive row-housing. This is about a two-page passage written arount 1450…

"Alberti's notion of "varieta"" as the expression of human individuality leads Filarete to the further claim that, just as one human being differs from another, so each building is unique: 'You will never see any building or .. house or dwelling that exactly resembles another either in appearance, in form or in beauty.' At the same time he formulates -- for the first time as far as the present writer can see -- the possibility of limitless rows of identical houses: 'If he wished, man could build houses that resembled one another in form and appearance, so that they all looked alike.' But he stigmatizes this as an offence against the divine plan of Creation."

This passage is valuable because it demonstrated the timelessness of some architectural theories -- and the rich past we inherit. At stake here is a reason to react to the banal, everyday work that is done, sometimes as a byproduct of larger forces. In that search, in that justification, are present the core values for what we do. In Filarete's 14th Century text, that justification naturally bows towards divine motivation, and percolated into his plans for Sforzenda. And today? Comments are, of course, always welcome...

People Talking About Architecture – 02.24.2006

University of Virginia:
Sanford Kwinter – Dean’s Forum Lecture
5:00 PM - Campbell Hall
The Associate Professor of Architecture at Rice University will speak.

Cornell University:
Rudiger Lainer - Order(s), Rule(s), Use(s)
6:30 PM - 157 Sibley Hall
The Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna will continue the (un)cool tradition of using parenthesis to create double entendre in lecture titles. Perhaps there will be a rebuttal from the slash/camp next week.

University of South Florida:
Michael Speaks – (Untitled Lecture)
6:00 PM - 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, Tampa

On Ornament

In a typical over-hurried fashion, Architecture Magazine ran an interesting story this month on the proliferation of active skins for new buildings. Quickly citing buildings on three continents and delivering catch-phrases and street credibility from the thinkers of the last thirty years, the article proves only to be a good place to start if readers want to examine the issues that animated skins provide Architecture. The high-points from C.C. Sullivan's article include...

"With the highest-tech or more mundane means, a few architects are synthesizing edifice and communication in startling ways. Marshall McLuhan anticipated this development long ago, well before he died in 1980. So if the medium is the building—what's the message?

One answer is that architecture for our time cannot afford to be static. Another is that ornament has once again escaped the architect's clutch. On the former point, consider the robotic envelopes on the lab bench at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and under production in Europe, energy-saving arrays that stir collectively as do fields of sunflowers and, like frog skin, respond instantly to changing cloud cover and ambient humidity. Regarding the latter, who expected that Blackberry-wielders would one day play Pong, the antediluvian bar game, on the face of the French National Library? [...]

Of course, less pecuniary interests have converged on the active façade, too, including influential thinkers. Toyo Ito, who calls architecture "media-clothing," led the way in 1986 with his seminal Tower of the Winds in Yokohama, Japan. Today, the avant-garde probes the outer limits while the old guard eggs them on, like Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown trumpeting "Viva electronic pixels over decorative rivets!"

Mr. Sullivan's in a rush to get a lot in a few words. However that glance at the issue of ornament is worth thinking about. Continuing on a recent Ruskin post, let us read into the Seven Lamps of Architecture for clues regaurding the victorian's disposition towards the skins of tomorrow... [From Ruskin's Lamp of Truth]

"Ornament, as I have often before observed, has two entirely distinct sources of agreeableness: one, that of the abstract beauty of its forms, which, for the present we will supposed to be the same whether they come from the hand or the machine; the other the sense of human labour and care spent upon it. How great this latter influence we may perhaps judge, by considering that there is not a cluster of weeds growing in any of ruin which has not a beauty in a; respects nearly equal, and, in some, immeasurably superior to that of the most elaborate sculpture of its stones: and that all our interest in the carved work, our sense of it's richness, though it is tenfold less rich than the knots of grass beside it; of its delicacy, though it is a thousandfold less delicate; of its admirableness, though a millionfold less admirable; results from a consciousness of its being the work of the poor, clumsy, toilsome man. Its true delightfulness depends on your discovering in the record of thoughts, and intents, and trails, and heartbreaking -- of recoveries and joyfulness of its success: all this can be traced by a practiced eye; but,, granting it even obscure, it is presumed or understood; and in that is the worth of the thing, just as much as the worth of anything else we call precious. The worth of a diamond is simply the understanding of the time it must take to look for it before it is found; and the worth of an ornament is the time it must take before it can be cut. It has an intrinsic value besides, which the diamond has not; (for a diamond has no more real beauty that a piece of glass;) but I do not speak of that at present; I place the two on the same ground; and I suppose that the hand-wrought ornament can no more be known from machine work , than a Diamond be known from paste; nay the latter may deceive, for a moment the mason's, as the other the jewelers, eye: and that it can be detected only by the closest examination. Yet exactly as the woman of feeling would never wear false jewels, so would be a builder of honour distain false ornaments. The use of them is just as downright and inexcusable a lie. You use that which pretends to a worth which it has not; it is an imposition, a vulgarity, an impertinence, and a sin. Down with it down to the ground, grind it to powder, leave its ragged place upon the wall, rather; you have not paid for it, you have no business with it, you do not want it. Nobody wants ornaments in this world, but everybody wants integrity. All the fair devices that ever were fancied are not worth a lie. Leave your walls as bare as a planed board, or build them of baked mud and chopped straw, if need be; but do not rough-cast them with falsehood."

C.C.Sullivan's article was quick to lump in these active skins with a larger architectural tradition of ornament. Is it? If the color of the building is a functional requirement of the program of the building (as in Herzog & de Muron's Stadium), is this more than ornament? What would it take to create a new genre of building component to satisfy the in-between?

People Talking About Architecture – 02.23.2006

Parsons:
Jeanne Gang - Interface Lecture
6:15 PM - 25 E. 13th St.
Jeanne Gang will talk about the recent architectural work of Studio Gang.

Architectural Association:
Charles Jencks - The Iconic Building: A Transitory or Permanent Condition
6:30 PM - Lecture Hall (36 Bedford Square, London)
Mr. Jenks believes that a new type of architecture has emerged in the last ten years: the iconic landmark building. He will spend about an hour explaining how this building challenges the traditional architectural monument.

Syracuse University School of Architecture
Guy Nordenson - Recent Work
4:30 PM - Slocum 108
Mr. Nordenson is the founder of Guy Nordenson + Associates.

San Francisco:
Teddy Cruz – (Untitled Lecture)
6:30 PM - SFMOMA Phyllis Wattis Theater (151 Third Street)

People Talking About Architecture – 02.22.2006

Princeton University:
Scott Bukatman - Secret Identity Politics
6:00 PM - Betts Auditorium

Columbia University:
Cristina Diaz Moreno + Efren Garcia Grinda - ALIEN NOISE
6:30 PM - Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall

Ohio State University
Ali Rahim – (Untitled Lecture)
5:30 PM - Knowlton Hall Auditorium
Mr. Rahim will discuss how digital design techniques have the potential to affect the wider cultural landscape in profound ways. It is his position that digital technologies allow architecture to engage in a feedback loop with its context to absorb influences and produce concrete effects on its users (in this case architects).

SCI-Arc:
Vlad and Luidmila Kirpichev - Re-Imagining the Story of the Russian Avant-Garde
7:00 PM – Main Space
Remember that all SCI-Arc lectures will be broadcast live over the internet, and are accessible here.

Cornell University:
Homa Farjadi - Contingent Locations
6:30pm - Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
The London Architect Professor at the University of Pennsylvania will speak about his work.

University of California, Berkley:
Hitoshi Abe: The Elephant and the Architecture Print
7:00 PM - 112 Wurster Hall
The Japanese architect and professor is known for work that is ”spatially complex” and “structurally innovative,” including the 1996 Yomiuri Media Miyagi Guest House, 2000 Miyagi Stadium, and the 2005 Comptoir Aobatei. He is also the winner of the Architects Institute of Japan Award and Business Week/ Architectural Record Award in 2003.


University of Notre Dame:
Liliane Tsui - Aligning Art with Architecture
4:30 PM - 104 Bond Hall
One of Hong Kong's leading commercial artists will speak about her commissions from a number of world-class hotels for interior design including over-sized oil paintings and bronze-relief work.


Architectural Association:
Andrew Freear - Rural Studio: Design through Making in Small-Town America
6.30 PM - Lecture Hall (36 Bedford Square, London)
AA graduate Andrew Freear moved to the small community of Newbern, West Alabama six years ago, in order to direct the Rural Studio. He will likely present work from these last few years in the American South. We miss you Sambo, and Andrew will probably find the words to bestb describe why.

Renneslear Polytechnic University:
Scott Wyatt – (Untitled Lecture)
6:00 PM - Greene Gallery

People Talking About Architecture – 02.21.2006

Harvard:
Margie Ruddick – Sustainability, People and Landscape Form
6:00 PM - Gund Hall Piper Auditorium
The principal at Wallace, Roberts & Todd will deliver a lecture expected to mix architectural and urban planning ideas. The firm is doing a $18 Billion "Framework Plan" for Bring New Orleans Back Commission, which NPR's Morning Edition covered last month.

Woodbury University School of Architecture and Design
John Fernandez – (Untitled Lecture)
6:30 PM - Design Center (7500 Glenoaks Boulevard, Burbank CA)
Mr. Fernandez is an Associate Professor of Building Technology Program at MIT

Architectural Association:
Vicente Guallart - Media, Mountains & Architecture
6:30 PM - Lecture Hall (36 Bedford Square, London)

Palm Springs CA:
Talk: A Special Evening With Karim Rashid
6:00 PM - Palm Springs Art Museum (101 Museum Drive)

People Talking About Architecture – 02.20.2006

Yale University:
Craig Dykers - A way of thinking, a way of working, and the works of Snohetta
6:30 PM – Hastings Hall (180 York Street)

University of Pennsylvania
Charles Jencks - The Iconic Building, the Power of Enigma more
6:30pm - B-1 Meyerson Hall
The author and architect will speak at Penn – In case you miss him on the East Coast this Monday, you get a chance to see him at the AA on Thursday. If you miss all these chance, this interview on Archinect is pretty good too.

University of Michigan:
Michael Sorkin – (Untitled Lecture)
6:00 PM – Art + Architecture Building Lecture Hall
The Saarinen Visiting Professor will speak, and perhaps reveal in greater detail why it is that the University of Michigan press publishes some of his books.

California College for the Arts:
Aaron Betsky – (Architecture Lecture Series)
2:00 PM - Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco Campus
The director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute was curator of architecture, design, and digital projects at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1995 to 2001, so this is something of a homecoming.

Californis College for the Arts (again):
Bruce Tomb – (Architecture Lecture Series)
7:00 PM - Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
Bruce Tomb will speak about some of his designs for residential architecture, installations and exhibition design, and furniture and fixtures, including the elegant cast basins of his firm, Infinite Fitting. He is an adjunct professor in the Architecture and Sculpture Programs at CCA, so this is home turf lecture.

New Jersey Institute of Technology
Esther da Costa Meyer - Redefining Modernism: The Work of Lina Bo Bardi
5:45 PM - Weston Lecture Hall 1

Architectural Association:
Alisa Andrasek - Material Potency: Probabilistic Programming: Emergent Composure: Polyscale
6:30 PM - Lecture Hall (36 Bedford Square, London)
If you missed her last week in Tampa, or last month in New York, here is a chance to see Biothing’s algorithms in Engliand.

Goodbye Philip Cortelyou Johnson

Fittingly held at Yale, this weekend will witness the farewell symposium for the late "Dean of American Architects," Philip Johnson. The keynote will be tonight, but a pre-emptive talk was held yesterday at the MoMA, where Jeff Kipnis and Terrance Riley spoke about the man and his legend. There will be plenty of opportunities to air the complaints, but tonight in respectful memory, DYWSC? presents this quote from Kipnis at the event, full of shared, envious, admiration...

"Philip's life is the easiest life in the world to talk about. In fact, Philip's life is so easy to talk about that you begin to realize that the content of the average life is probably… it might average one-to-a-person. In fact, some people live 10, 15 lives while all the rest of us live 1/10th of a life. With Philip that's possible, and that's why he's a legend and will always be a legend."

Rorschach test

The haunting dimension of John Ruskin's writing continues to be how timely the observances are, no matter the age. The struggle with the following quote was deciding to which current architectural situation it best applies. Only after reflection does it become evident that Ruskin knew the answer. The work carries such purchase because it is careful to be broadly inclusive. This guarantees that the reader will find the best application; he cleverly compliments the intellect of the reader. As one reads this passage from the The Lamp of Sacrifice [The Seven Lamps of Architecture] below, it is interesting to watch the subjects one’s mind wanders toward. Therein lie the readers’ values, that Ruskin cleverly has the authorship of evoking and agreeing with, 160 years later...

"We are no one of us so good architects as to be able to work habitually beneath our strength; and yet there is not a building that I know of, lately raised, wherein it is not sufficiently evident that neither architect nor builder has done his best... Ours as has consistently the look of money's worth, of a stopping short wherever and whenever we can, of a lazy compliance with low conditions; never of a fair putting forth of our strength. Let us have done with this kind of work at once: cast off every temptation to do it: do not let us degrade ourselves voluntarily, and then mutter and mourn over our shortcomings; let us confess our poverty or our parsimony, but not belie our human intellect. It is not a question of how much we are to do, but of how it is to be done; it is not a question of doing more, but doing better."

People Talking About Architecture – 02.17.2006

The University of South Florida:
Yung-Ho Chang - (Untitled Lecture)
6:00 PM - 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, Tampa

Architecture Association:
Toyo Ito - Morning Conversation
11:00 AM - Front Members’ Room
Coinciding with his visit to the UK to receive this year's RIBA Gold Medal in Architecture, Toyo Ito will participate in an informal discussion with AA students moderated by AA Director Brett Steele and AA Diploma Unit Master Shin Egashira.

People Talking About Architecture – 02.16.2006

Yale University:
Sam Jacob - Everything you Can Eat
6:00 – Hastings Hall (180 York Street)
The designer from the London-based design firm Fat will discuss recent work.

University of Washington:
Erik Larson: The Devil in the White City: A Discussion with the Author
6:30 PM - UW Kane Hall 130
The University of Washington will host a discussion on Mr. Larson's book and its impact.

Washington DC:
Moshe Safdie - (Untitled Lecture)
6:30 PM – National Building Museum
The principal of Moshe Safdie and Associates will discuss his recent museum designs, which include the Boston Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, the Skirball Museum and Cultural Center in Los Angeles, and the recently opened Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. In addition, he will describe current projects in Washington, D.C., including the Institute for Peace and a major federal building.

New York:
Terence Riley & Jeffrey Kipnis - Philip Johnson: Portraits
6:00 PM - MoMA
Terence Riley, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, MoMA, and Jeffrey Kipnis, Professor of Architecture, Knowlton School of Architecture, Ohio State University, will give individual presentations in honor of the architect and curator, followed by a screening of Merrill Brockway’s 1965 film This Is Philip Johnson and a discussion. This event is a a taste of the MoMA event tomorrow and symposium in New Haven this weekend honoring the late architect.

London:
Toyo Ito - Changing Geometries / Changing Architecture
6:30 PM - Jarvis Hall (RIBA: 66 Portland Place)
The [former boxer world famous architect -ed] will give the 2006 Royal Gold Medal Lecture and present a selection of his projects.

Massimiliano Fuksas and Wolf Prix: The RIBA International Fellows Debate 2006
12:30 PM - Florence Hall (RIBA: 66 Portland Place)
The recipients of this year's RIBA International Fellowships will take part in a lunch-time panel discussion, chaired by Jack Pringle, RIBA President

People Talking About Architecture – 02.15.2006

Princeton University:
Denise Scott Brown - Systems as Pattern
6:00 PM - Betts Auditorium
The Founding partner of Venturi Scott Brown, co-author if “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” Professor of Architecture and Princton University, and subject of upcoming documentary “Learning from Bob & Deinise” will deliver a home turf lecture.

Columbia University:
Brian O’Doherty - Studio and Cube
6:30 PM - Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall
The author of “Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space.” Will deliver a lecture about some of his findings. (He’s been at this for a while.)

Harvard:
Monica Ponce de Leon & Nader Tehrani – Recent Work
6:00 PM - Gund Hall Piper Auditorium
The founders of Boston’s Office dA will give a home turf lecture.

Cornell:
Charles Waldheim - Landscape, Urban Order, and Structural Change
6:30 PM - Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
Mr. Waldheim is the director of the Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Toronto, an an editor of Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives.

Ohio State University:
James Corner - (Untitled Lecture)
5:30 PM - Knowlton Hall Auditorium
The landscape architect, urban designer, and founder of Field Operations will speak.

SCI-Arc:
Taft Green - Interpretations of Space
7:00 PM – Main Space
The LA artist will speak to architecture students.

University of Michigan:
David Pitt - "Participatory Approaches to Environmental Design"
The professor at the University of Minnesota Landscape Architecture program will speak, can't quiet figure out when.


University of California at Berkley:
Branner Fellows - Branner Fellows Lecture
7:00 PM - 112 Wurster Hall
The Branner Fellowship recipients at the University of California include Jeffrey Carney (Geography of the Neighborhood); Kristi Dykema (RE-Habitation: Interpretations of Growth); Laura Mezoff (Over Our Heads); and Beau Trincia (The Active Wall: Architecture as Interface) This lecture will open an exhibit of the work of the Branner Fellows on display at the school.

Boston:
Jane Weinzapfel & David Collins - Frozen Music and Liquid Architecture
The president of the Boston Society of Architects (Weinzapel) and pianist (Collins) will lead listeners on a visual and musical exploration of the “extraordinary relationship” between ‘frozen music’ (architecture) and ‘liquid architecture’ (music).”

New York:
Evan Douglis - Dazzle Topology
6:00 PM - Center for Architecture (536 LaGuardia Place)
The principal of Evan Douglis Studio and Chair of the Undergraduate Program at Pratt will discuss building meaning with/through digital form-generation, and such forms' direct digital fabrication.

People Talking About Architecture – 02.14.2006

Harvard:
Michelle Provoost – (Untitled Lecture)
6:00 PM - Gund Hall Piper Auditorium
Harvard’s visiting scholar will speak about what he’s studying.

University of Toronto:
Diane Lewis - Eros and Psyche: Architecture
The namesake of Diane Lewis Architects will deliver a lecture to honor her post as the Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design. The lecture seems named for the special day -- hopefully her story will have a better ending (Here's a short speech she gave last year at the Architecture League).

Architectural Association:
David Adjaye - Making Public Buildings: Specificity, Imbrication, Customisation
6.30 PM - Lecture Hall (36 Bedford Square, London)
The founding partner at Adjaye Associates will present several building projects to test these questions... “What is ‘public’ at the beginning of the 21st century? What is the nature of public space and what is the role of public buildings today? Are traditional models still relevant in the urban fabric today? How does building technology play its part?” The man is getting a lot of press lately.

People Talking About Architecture – 02.13.2006

Yale University:
Amanda Burden - Shaping the City: A Strategic Blueprint for New York's Future
6:30 PM – Hastings Hall (180 York Street)
Amanda Burden is an urban planner and civic activist, the Chair of New York's City Planning Commission, and 2004 recipient of the Design Patron Award from the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. This should prove to be a nice lecture, but it is odd how this talk opens Yale's new exhibit, Prairie Skyscraper : Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower.

University of Florida:
Alfonso Perez-Mendez – (Untitled Lecture)
6:00 PM – U.F. Harn Museum of Art Auditorium
A home turf lecture for the professor of Architecture.

Harvard:
Sejima Kazuyo - Public Lecture
6:00 PM - Gund Hall Piper Auditorium

University of Pennsylvania:
Roger Duffy - Recent Works
6:30 PM - B-1 Meyerson Hall
The partner at the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's New York office will discuss more of SOM's work.

New Jersey Institute of Technology:
Laurie Hawkinson - Working Public Infrastructure
5:45 PM - Weston Lecture Hall 1
The founding partner of Smith-Miller + Hawkinson will have a lot to present since her last lecture at the NJIT in 1999.

New York:
Discussion - Brad Cloepfil & Christine Jetten
6:00 PM - Center for Architecture (536 LaGuardia Place)
The architect and artist will discuss the process for creating the individual tiles for Two Columbus Circle's new façade, the Museum of Arts and Design's new home.

Introduction to Architecture [Arch 101a]

John Hill's blog, A Daily Dose of Architecture, points today to Michael Meredith's new book, Notes for Those Beginning the Discipline of Architecture. In our Introduction to Architecture classes ten years ago, it was Steen Rasmuseen's book Experiencing Architecture that familiarized uninitiated students with an appreciation for rhythm, color and balance in architectural work. (The photo on page 127, starting Chapter VI - Rhythm, remains a shockingly profound pedagogical use of architectural photography.) If his publishers are to be believed, today's youngsters are getting the straight dope from the start with Mr. Meredith's book. To see how much innocence architectural education has lost, read the following contrasting segments. The first is the preface from Mr. Rasmussen's 1962 book, and what follows is a description from Mr. Meredith's publisher's website. First Mr. Rasmussen...

"In writing this volume I naturally hope that my architect colleagues will read it and that they will find something of interest in the thoughts and ideas that I have gathered during my many years. But the book has a further aim. I believe that it is important to tell people outside the profession what it is that we are engaged in. In olden days, then entire community took part in forming the dwellings and implements they used. The individual was in fruitful contact with these things; the anonymous houses were built with a natural feeling for place, materials, and use and the result was a naturally suitable comeliness. Today in our highly civilized society, the houses in which ordinary people are doomed to live in and gaze upon are on the whole without quality. We cannot however, got back to the old method of personally supervised handicrafts. We must strive to advance by arousing interest in and understanding of the work the architect does."

"Architecture is a discipline plagued by its own insecurities, a curious mixture of optimism and pessimism, momentary successes and, more commonly, deep frustrations. In this new publication, Michael Meredith, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, tackles the problems facing the discipline head-on, interrogating its internal dynamics and searching for a mode of practice that can survive amid the confusing, conflicting demands of contemporary culture. Nominally addressed to students entering the field, "Notes for those beginning the discipline of architecture" is a scathing take on the profession from one of its emerging young practitioners, outlining its pitfalls, its excruciating failures, and – in spite of it all – its undeniable potentials. The accompanying DVD, Alternate Ending 1: The Glimmering Noise, is a hilarious and sobering mock debate (inspired by a morbid fascination with William Buckley, Jr.'s Firing Line) that dissects the curious position of the architect amid the fickle, shifting forces of the 21st century market economy. An insider's unflinching look at the problems facing current architectural practice, Meredith's work is of interest to anyone who cares about the potentials of design today."

People Talking About Architecture – 02.11.2006

Washington DC:
Antoine Predock, FAIA - (Untitled Lecture)
4:00 PM - National Building Museum
The recipient of the 2006 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal, and Albuquerque, New Mexico-based architect will discuss his award-winning work. Following the lecture, Predock and Robert Ivy, FAIA, editor-in-chief of Architectural Record magazine, will discuss the designer’s philosophy and projects.

New York:
Symposium: On-Site: New Architecture in Spain
10:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Columbia and Harvard have contributed to the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit, one of Terrance Riley’s last.

People Talking About Architecture – 02.10.2006

The Museum of Modern Art (&Columbia University):
Symposium: On-Site: New Architecture in Spain
6:30 PM - Titus Theatre 2 (& Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall at Columbia University, GSAPP)
The Keynote Address will take place at MoMA, Titus Theatre also be projected via live simulcast in Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall at Columbia University, GSAPP. The event’s subject is somewhat self explanatory, and will kick-off an exhibit at the MoMA of the same title.

SCI-Arch:
Raimund Abraham in discussion with Eric Owen Moss
1:00 PM - Kappe Library
The discussion will focus on Moss’s exhibit of the JingYa Ocean Entertainment Center, in Beijing.

University of South Florida:
Chris Perry & Alisa Andrasek - (Untitled Lecture)
6:00 PM - 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, Tampa

Quote Clearinghouse (2)

The Quote Clearinghouse posts are designed to bring attention to exchanges worth reading, but not topical enough to justify their own post. Both come from recent downloads at Architecture Radio. This first one is from the recording “Keeping the Design in Public Architecture” and is either Cathy Simon, Alison Williams, or Marilynn Thompson addressing how architects must be advocates of the public realm, and dissussing how they must do more to advance good design in public architecture…

“[The role of the Architect is to] try and bring a voice of experience, knowledge, and respect to the notion of hiring an architect, and then sheparding the project so there's a voice of dissent about what is important – not just the parameters, and how much it costs to run it, and those things. It’s about the experience of the building, its durability as a metaphor. Think about Jefferson for a minute, or if any of you saw the movie about Louis Kahn. Buildings that are in the public realm become metaphors for that society. When Thomas Jefferson built the campus at the University of Virginia, he built it as an ideal, utopian, academical village that was expressing the values of the University of Virginia, and the values of American democracy, as he saw them. Since he was one of the inventors of them, he could see them quite clearly. Or when you see in the very last part of the Louis Kahn movie "My Architect" (His son just directed it.) and its in Bangledesh, and there's this architect there who worked with Kahn and who is weeping. [That architect said of Kahn,] "This man gave us democracy." That's not about how many dollars it costs to operate the building. It's not about a high performance building versus a normal building. It’s not about all those things that we’re quantifying today in this society. It’s really about something much, much more and much higher. It’s something about breathing life into a place where people come together.”

… and secondly here’s how Michael Rock started a lecture in San Francisco recently, commenting on the nature of his graphic design practice. There are only a few professions that still “practice” – medicine, law, and design are the big ones. The intentional pause at the end of the quote makes the recording very potent, and makes on think about what’s trying to be said.

"This is a talk about a professional design practice, and a professional design practice is a strange beast because it is a fairly aimless activity. You're constantly pulled in these directions by whatever happens to come through the door each day. So one day we're making up obscure architectural theory, the next day we're packaging shaving cream; making newspapers then wallpaper. It seems like on one hand we're asked that our authorial vision be so strong that we can mold any project in our image, and on the other hand, we're expected to be perfect chameleons – kind of realizing and embodying our client’s hopes and dreams. In a way, the hardest part is just remaining positive.”

People Talking About Architecture – 02.09.2006

Yale University:
Sam Jacob - Everything you Can Eat
6:00 – Hastings Hall (180 York Street)
The designer from the London-based design firm Fat will discuss recent work.

University of Pennsylvania:
Judy Glantzman - (Untitled Lecture)
5:00 PM - B-3 Meyerson Hall
The painter will talk to architects, perhaps about Architecture.

Chicago:
James Cuno & Joseph Rosa - New Vision for Architecture and Design
6:00 P.M. - Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago (enter through Michigan Avenue doors)
James Cuno (President and Director) and Joseph Rosa (Curator of Architecture and Design) will discuss the newly renamed Department of Architecture and Design, broadening the collection, and the enhanced presence of the department within the Renzo Piano-designed north wing.

San Diego:
Michael Bell - Art, Architecture, and Ecology: Reviving Our Social Environment
6:30 PM - Woodbury University (1060 Eighth Avenue, suite 200)
This was also posted on 01.29.2006, one of these might be wrong.

Syracuse University:
Laura Kurgan - The Next Small Thing
4:30 PM - Slocum 108
The director of Spatial Information Design Laboratory and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University will speak. Usually her subject includes the interface between building, electronic media, and information technology in both her art and her architecture.

New York:
Arsenio P. Amaral - (Untitled Lecture)
6:00 PM - The Urban Center (457 Madison Avenue)
In anticipation of the Museum of Modern Art exhibition On-Site: New Architecture in Spain opening Friday, this lecture on the work of Corona y P.Amaral and N.Tres architects.

Value by Association

Steven Barrie-Anthony at the Los Angeles times filed an interesting article last Monday entitled Building Cachet by Association. He tracked a recent jump in the number of advertisers leveraging the look and feel of recently completed architectural works as life-style setting for their products. The article does well to present both the stratagies and the tactics of the creative staffs who are making the ads -- and intellectual property grey-area that the habit veers into. Here are two telling quotes that illustrate the scale of reactions a building receives once it enters the public realm...

"Other executives and producers are less interested in borrowing architectural prestige than in using blurred shots of walls and ceilings and architectural details to subtly compliment foreground products. In this case, buildings are often barely recognizable. ‘I loved the lines at Disney Hall,’ says Deborah White, senior art director at Macy's, who arrived there to shoot a section of the store's fall 2005 catalog. ‘The lines were just perfect. Our trend of clothing was burnt-out velvets, and beading and so forth. Disney Hall lent itself to the whole look — sleek and elegant.’"

"But other architects and aficionados of the craft find its use in advertising troubling. After all, they say, there's a thin line between appreciation and appropriation. Didn't at least some people cringe when a deceased Fred Astaire danced onto TV screens with a Dirt Devil-brand vacuum cleaner? When Mercedes-Benz played Janis Joplin's soulful treatise on materialism, ‘Mercedes Benz,’ as the soundtrack to a commercial? Why should great architecture, when used for commercial purposes, not be included in that same discussion?"

People Talking About Architecture – 02.08.2006

SCI-Arc:
FAT - Ad Hoc Urbanism
7:00 PM – Main Space
Sean Griffiths and Charles Holland, directors at FAT, are scheduled to deliver a talk. Remember that all SCI-Arc lectures are broadcast live over the internet. If one is unable to make it to the lecture in person, there is an option to tune-in at http://www.sciarc.edu/live. -- or wait until until Sam Jacobs presents at Yale this Thursday.

Ohio State University:
Juha Huuskonen - Lecture
5:30 PM - Knowlton Hall Auditorium

Columbia University:
Zaha Hadid - Simultaneous Engagements
6:30 PM - Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall
The principal of Zaha Hadid Architects and recent Pritzker Prize winner will talk.

Chicago:
Jeanne Gang - Through Material (ArcheWorks Open House)
5:00 PM – ArcheWorks (625 North Kingsbury St.)
This lecture is billed also as a chance to meet ArcheWorks co-founders designer Eva Maddox and architect Stanley Tigerman. Mrs. Gang is principal and founder of Studio Gang. Hopefully she will show influences in her current work with stories of working with OMA and Rem Koolhaas.

University of Washington:
Charles Rose - Topographical Variations
6:30 PM - Architecture Hall 147

Renneslear Polytechnic University:
James Collins - Lecture
6: 00 PM - Greene Gallery

University of Florida:
Lisa Sasser - The Challenges of Traditional Building and Sustainable Crafts
6:00 PM - Location to be announced.

University of Minnesota:
Max Underwood - Inside the Office of Charles and Ray Eames
12:15 PM - Room 225 Ralph Rapson Hall (89 Church Street SE, Minneapolis)
The (well accomplished) professor from Arizona State University presents findings from his recent book.

Syracuse University School of Architecture:
Birger Sevaldson - Design Computing in the Post Digital Age
4:30 PM - The Warehouse, Main Auditorium
“Post Digital” was coined/used my John Madea of the MIT Media Lab many years ago. Anyone is welcome in this forum to comment on how Sevaldson spins it to architecture.

Robots doing the Dirty Work

Building Design has posted two exciting articles about an almost imaginary situation soon to face architects. There are two major research institutes ready to deliver robots that "print" whole buildings directly from designers' three dimensional computer models.

There have been several methods of robo-construction proposed over the years, and a favorite has been the distributed-system method that other researchers (not related to BD articles) have been tinkering with. Distributed systems are characterized by one large task being divided into smaller tasks, and a team of communicating agents completing the aggregated work without necessarily knowing the larger stratagy. This seemed a far more clever and versatile system than having a giant 3d printer slowly excrete a design, but until now such statements were critiques of science fiction.

The prospect is exciting because of the series of crises that cheap, mechanical construction threatens to bring. Remember your high school history classes describing the way shifts of power necessitated balance-restoring wars throughout European history? Similarly, the Vitruvian Triad suggests Architecture is a balance of firmness, commodity, and delight. The technology Building Design highlights will threaten to deliver firmness and an economy of building very simply. How will this effect delight? This question may have thousands of very familiar instantiations... "If any wavy-gravy form is strong and cheap, why make this particular one into the house?" "If we can print thousands of interlocking houses, which pattern of interlocking housing types make the best neighborhoods?" "Is a printed house somehow more, or less valuable than a hand-made one of similar design?" "Where is the craft in this?"

People Talking About Architecture – 02.07.2006

Berlage Institute:
Rem Koolhaas – (Unknow Title)
19:00 - The Berlage Institute Gallery (Botersloot 25, Rotterdam)

London:
Victor Trahan & Others – (No Title)
6.30 PM – Wren Room (RIBA 66 Portland Place, London W1)
Trahan Architects created a potent and moving oratory within a church complex in Louisiana with a most sensitive handling of space and light. Victor Trahan will discuss this winning project and other works by the US-based practice.

London:
Chris Wilkinson - Exploring Boundaries
6.30 PM - The Gallery (70 Cowcross Street, London, EC1M 6BP)
The principal at Wilkinson Eyre Architects will talk about his new book of the same title. To the the firm the title refers to the boundaries between Art and Science, Architecture and Engineering, Art and Architecture as well as many architectural territories such as Form, Space, Geometry, Lightness, Responsivity, Innovation, Narrative and Digital Technology.

People Talking About Architecture – 02.06.2006

Yale University:
Tony Fretton - Buildings and their Territories
6:30 PM – Hastings Hall (180 York Street)
The English architect and principal of Tony Fretton Architects will likely talk about his new publication about his design for the New British Embassy, in Warsaw, amoung other projects. See this Building Design article if you can’t attend the lecture.

Notre Dame:
Robert Campbell - Why Don't the Rest of Us Like the Buildings the Architects Like?
4:30 PM - 104 Bond Hall
Robert Campbell is a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for The Boston Globe. He will discuss his reflections and observations after 30 years with the paper and as a frequent writer for other publications.

University of Pennsylvania:
Iñaki Ábalos - Pavilions, Observatories and Recycled Landscapes
6:30 PM - B-1 of Meyerson Hall
The Principal of Abalos & Herreros in Madrid, and the Visiting Professor of Architecture Design at Princeton will use his US stop to talk about recent work, and maybe the book from 2000 or recent El Croquis. It would be cool to see him present the Lasesarre Football Stadium. If you can’t make it to Philly, here’s a recent interview/article, and he will be lecturing at Washington University on the 20th of next month.

Princeton University:
Louis Mansilla & Emilio Tunon - Playgrounds
6:00 PM - Betts Auditorium
The principals of Mansilla + Tunon Arquitectos, also based in Madrid. Hopefully they will speak about their Contemporary Art Center Of Castilla Y León, which was written up in Architecture Record last year.

New Jersey Institute of Technology:
James Wines – SITE: Identity in Density
5:45 PM - Weston Lecture Hall

University of Illinois at Chicago:
John Ronan: Recent Work
6:00 PM - 1100 A+A Building

SCI-Arch:
Álvaro Rojas – Nightmares, Dreams and Daydreams
1:00 PM - Main Space
Dean, Faculty of Architecture and Environmental Design at the Universidad del Diseño will deliver a lecture whose full title is Nightmares, Dreams and Daydreams: Architecture in Costa Rica and Architectural Education @ UNIDIS

Architectural Association:
Peter Swinnen - In Comes the Space Producer: The architect dissected and declared dead
6:30 PM - Lecture Hall? (36 Bedford Square, London)
The professor at the LaCambre Architecture School, and partners at 51n4e will speak about work from the last five years. All projects will be shown in their evolutionary development, and not as final objects. He will give the same lecture at Sci-Arch next month.

London:
Seminar - Prefabulous Homes
2:00 PM – Building Centre (26 Store Street, London WC1)
Alan Wright of BPTW architects, Martin Horsler , Make Architects, Ken Taylor of Quay2C architects, and James Burland of BurlandTM present. This seminar is in conjunction with the Prefabulous London exhibition in the New London Architecture gallery.

On Quiet Offices (21st Century)

On sweet summer nights, when you catch a lightning bug and put it in a jar, by the next morning its butt no longer shines.

In the same vein, there is something unsympathetic to Architecture in the today’s architectural practice. Practices are businesses. The main actors in such enterprises are like-minded men of skill, whom offer their design expertise for profit. As in all other corners of the business world, architects compete with each other for clients and commissions, necessarily lowering what they charge to stay competitive. For this reason, the business of architecture demands high productivity, and a standardization that delivers quantifiable, measurable product to generate a large enough capacity to stay lucrative. This impulse towards standardization, controllable regularity, and constancy are antithetical to the drive that keeps Architecture experimental, clever, fresh, and alive.

When he wrote the introduction to his book, The Space of Encounter, Daniel Libeskind probably had this conflict in mind. The first few paragraphs included…

“Ever since I began architecture, I’ve had an abhorrence of conventional architecture offices. There was something about the atmosphere of redundancy, routine, and production that made me allergic to all forms of specialization and so called professionalism… The work [his office made] has developed in unexpected directions through a practice that does not mimic existing procedures, but instead attempts to break through into the excitement, adventure, and mystery of architecture. By dropping the designations ‘form,’ ‘function,’ and ‘program,’ and engaging in the public and political realm, which is synonymous with architecture, the dynamics of the building take on a new dimension…The magic of architecture cannot be appropriated by any singular operation because it is already always floating, progressing, rising, flying, breathing. Whatever the problems – political, tectonic, linguistic – that architecture exposes, one thing I know is that engaging in architecture is only exciting because of the intensity and passion of its call.”

… Practice’s undeniable drive towards pragmatism can be stifeling to this passion, a problem that is hard to ignore. This fact makes The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century, the book that commemorated the 2003 conference at Columbia University, a bit lacking. The book gathers and summarizes over 60 important architect’s comments on the direction and issues of the profession. (Mr. Libeskind is not represented.) Disappointingly, none of the essays glance at this commodification of creativity, or the manufactured state of most “custom designed” buildings. Many of the 60 essays wouldn’t even appear to belong in the same book, were it not for the broadly worded titles that corral them together, i.e. “Aesthetics + Urbanism,” “Detail + Identity,” or “Form + Influence.” Exception must be granted to Mr. Stanford Kwinter. On pages 94 and 95 Mr. Kwinter details “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Architecture (Long Live Architecture).”

“First, we need to face the fact that architecture is fast becoming part of the knowledge industry. ‘Design’ is becoming increasingly disassociated from simple ‘building’ and increasingly associated with the production of intellectual property: ideas, routines, contexts, entire social and cultural environments. Every social relation is now a target of design, not only relations of humans to objects and also humans to concrete environments but of humans to humans and humans to collective and symbolic enterprises as well. Architects are now the inventors of those intervening ‘films’ that seem to coat everything these days and that one used to call ‘interfaces.’ Now, more than ever, the reshaping of the knowledge system is inseparable from the transformation of the material environment. Architects must adapt to this emerging reality.”

His reflections help reposition architecture outside the service industry that has bound it. For the spirit of the profession, not the health of the academies, let us hope the current battles that are redefining intellectual property, do so to broaden our professional scope of services. And liven up the office.

People Talking About Architecture – 02.04.2006

Columbia:
Paratheses Symposium: Current Trajectories in Architectural Research
10:00 AM - Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall
This symposium addresses the emerging shift in architectural pedagogy on collaborative forms of research. The speakers will examine the implications of collective research initiatives and think-tanks which are quickly taking independant thesis project's place. The participants include Denise Scott Brown, Brendan Moran, Mark Jarzombek, Sarah Whiting, Roemer van Toorn, Jeffrey Inaba, Brett Steele, Sylvia Lavin, Keller Easterling, Mark Wigley, and Reinhold Martin.

People Talking About Architecture – 02.02.2006

Architectural Association:
James Corner - Thick
6:30 PM - Lecture Hall (36 Bedford Square, London)
The Principal of Field Operations and Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, will discuss Field Operations’ current ‘Thick’ projects. This means a focus upon sectional surfaces, layered landscapes and textural topographies, while at the same time alluding to haze, density and the unclear. Hopefully he will spend time on the work he’s contributing to High Line project in New York.

University of Pennsylvania:
Ali Rahim - Catalytic Formations
6:30 PM - B-1 Meyerson Hall
The Assistant Professor for the Department of Architecture and Director of the Contemporary Architecture Practice will discuss new work.

University of Buffalo:
Dennis Shelden – Lecture
5:30 PM - Crosby 301
The founder and Chief Technology Officer of Gehry Technologies will discuss his management and strategic direction for the firm's technology infrastructure, project applications, process and software development initiatives, and research and development.

New York:
Ila Berman, Joan Busquets, & Felipe Correa - New Orleans: Strategies for a City in Soft Land
7:00 PM - The National Arts Club (15 Gramercy Park South, 6C)
This discussion and book signing is with the Tulane University professor (Berman) and graduate (Correa) displaced and writing about the Katrina aftermath.