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For Immediate Release
INTO THE OPEN: THE CONFERENCE
What happens after the exhibition Into the Open is over? How can the issues explored in it be mobilized in contemporary practice?
Friday April 24, 2009, 5-9 PM
Kellen Auditorium, 66 Fifth Avenue, ground floor
Download the Conference Schedule
With welcoming remarks by conference coordinator
Laetitia Wolff
And an illustrated introduction/overview by curators
Aaron Levy and Bill Menking
Featured Speakers:
Teddy Cruz, Deborah Gans, Laura Kurgan, Rick Lowe
The curators will pose the following questions to the guest speakers, who have 20 minutes to present. Informal conversation with the public to follow, mediated by 3-4 agents provocateurs from the faculty of Parsons the New School:
Question #1: BEYOND EXHIBITION
What's the politics of displaying architecture? How can we actualize the ideas
presented in the exhibit, beyond the space and time of the exhibit?
Speaker: Rick Lowe
Agents provocateurs: Alfred Zollinger, Susan Yelavich, Lydia Matthews, Ken
Saylor, and Bob Rubin
Question #2: COMMUNITY OF INTEREST
Should the architect define the program or should it be the community's
responsibility?
Speaker: Teddy Cruz
Agents provocateurs: Jean Gardner, David Grahame Shane, Miodrag
Mitrasinovic, and John Thackara (UK)
Question #3: DATA ARCHITECTURE
How is research a form of architectural practice? Is digital visualization a new form of architecture ?
Speaker: Laura Kurgan
Agents provocateurs: William Bevington, Brian McGrath, and Sven Travis
Question #4: SHELTER AS CITY
How do you design sustainably for extreme conditions?
Speaker: Deborah Gans
Agents provocateurs: David Lewis, Robert Kirkbride, and Raoul Rickenberg
CURATORS
Aaron Levy is the Executive Director and Senior Curator of the Philadelphia-based Slought Foundation and on faculty in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
William Menking is an architectural historian and curator of architecture. He is the founder and co-editor of The Architect's Newspaper and a professor of Urbanism and City planning at Pratt Institute.
GUEST SPEAKERS
Guatemala-born Teddy Cruz, founder of Estudio Teddy Cruz, is an architect and
educator based in San Diego, CA whose practice and pedagogy, through
research and design production, has been focused on the particularities of the
bicultural territory of the U.S.-Mexican border. He is currently associate professor in Public Culture and Urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego and was appointed by San Diego Mayor's Jerry Sanders to serve as a member of the board of directors of San Diego's Center City Development Corporation. His work has been included in major architecture biennales, magazines and exhibits around the world and he has been pinned one of the emergent voices in American architecture.
www.estudioteddycruz.com
Deborah Gans is the principal of NY-based Gans studio and a full professor in the Architecture School at Pratt Institute. She is also visiting critic at Yale University. Many of Gans studio's projects in industrial design and architecture have a focus on social engagement, including a school desk for the New York School Construction Authority and alternative forms of housing for Kosovo and New Orleans. Current projects are a master plan for The Graham School in Hastings-on-Hudson New York. Among Gans' publications are the Le Corbusier Guide, now in its third edition (2006) and Extreme Sites: The 'Greening' of Brownfield (2004).
http://www.gans-studio.net
Laura Kurgan teaches architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture,
Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where she is the director of
the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL) and the Director of Visual Studies. Her recent projects include a multi-year SIDL project on "million-dollar blocks" and the urban costs of American incarceration, which has appeared most recently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (where it is part of the permanent collection). Her book on working with GPS and satellite imagery in various ways, Satellites, is forthcoming from Zone Books.
http://www.arch.columbia.edu/SIDL
Texas-based Rick Lowe is the founder of Project Row Houses, an arts and
cultural organization located in Houston's historically significant and culturally charged Third Ward neighborhood. As an artist, Lowe has participated in
exhibitions and programs internationally, and has worked as guest artist on a
number of community projects nationally. Lowe collaborated with arts consultant
Jessica Cusick on the Arts Plan for Rem Koolhaas' Seattle Public Library, and
worked with California-based artist Suzanne Lacy and curator Mary Jane Jacobs
on the Borough Project for Spoleto Festival 2003, in Charleston, South Carolina.
http://www.projectrowhouses.org
AGENTS PROVOCATEURS
Jean Gardner
Senior Faculty, School of Constructed Environments and School of Design
Strategies, Parsons; Co-Founder of the Michael Kalil Endowment for Smart Design at Parsons
Robert Kirkbride
Associate professor of Product Design and thesis coordinator in the product
design department, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons
David J. Lewis
Associate Professor, director of The Design Workshop, School of Constructed
Environments, Parsons
Lydia Matthews
Dean of Academic Programs of Parsons the New School for Design and
Professor in Art and Design History and Theory
Brian McGrath
Interim Director of Academic Affairs, and Associate Professor, Urban Design,
School of Constructed Environments, Parsons
Raoul Rickenberg
Assistant Professor in the School of Design Strategies, Parsons
Bob Rubin
Robert M. Rubin is an architectural historian and preservationist of Modernism
Grahame Shane
Adjunct Professor of Architecture, Columbia University and Cooper Union, author of Recombinant Urbanism (Wiley, 2005)
John Thackara (UK)
Programme director, Designs of the time (Dott 07), England; Commissioner, Tools for Survival, St Etienne Design Biennial, France
Susan Yelavich
Assistant Professor in Parson's School of History and Theory of Art and Design
Alfred Zollinger
Director of the BFAs in Interior Design and Architectural Design, Professor of interior design, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons
Sven Travis
Interim Dean, Communications Design and Technology
Miodrag Mitrasinovic
Chair of Design Strategies Urban Initiative
William Bevington
Executive Director, Parsons Institute for Information Mapping (PIIM); formerly Chair, Communication Design Department at Parsons The New School
