A Couple Events

Pardon the last minute notice, but here are a couple events -- a discussion and a conference -- taking place this evening and tomorrow.



Urban Design Since 1945 / David Grahame Shane
Thursday, November 17, 2011, 7-9pm at The Great Hall at The Cooper Union (7 East 7th Street, New York, NY)

D. Grahame Shane, with panelists Carola Hein, Brian McGrath, Georgeen Theodore, and Anthony Vidler, will present and discuss the emergence of postwar urban design as a global phenomenon. The program, which will begin with a historic overview by Shane, will focus on the themes developed in his recently published Urban Design Since 1945 – A Global Perspective.

By outlining the four dominant models in urban design over the last sixty years—the metropolis, the megalopolis, the fragmented metropolis, and the megacity—Shane provides a framework for analyzing the development of, and issues behind, contemporary urban form.

D. Grahame Shane teaches Graduate Urban Design at Columbia University and undergraduate students at The Cooper Union in New York. He also lectures for the Bartlett School of Architecture Graduate Urban Design Programme, University of London and at the Polytechnic in Milan, as well as participating in master classes at the University of Venice. He has lectured widely and published in architectural journals in Europe, the United States and Asia. He co-edited with Brian McGrath the Architectural Design title Sensing the 21st Century City: Close-Up and Remote, published in November 2005. His book Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory was published by John Wiley & Sons in June 2005.

Co-sponsored by the Architecture League of New York

Admission is free for League members and The Cooper Union students/faculty/staff, and $10 for non-members.

(See my review of Shane's book Urban Design Since 1945 here).

Second Wave of Modernism II: Landscape Complexity and Transformation
Friday, November 18, 2011, 8am - 4:30pm at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY)

In recent years there has been an accelerating attitudinal shift: a departure away from the modernist’s tabula rasa exemplified at varying scales by icons such as Philip Johnson’s Beck House in Dallas and the Lincoln Center Campus in New York. Today designers are returning to modernist sites with new motivations, attempting to balance the complex values of natural and cultural systems.

To investigate this significant evolution of professional practice, three groups of thematic presentations have been assembled that will collectively explore landscape transformations at residential, urban and metropolitan scales. The conference follows and continues dialogue initiated at the sold-out first conference convened in Chicago in 2008.

SPEAKERS:
Julie Bargmann
James Corner
Lisa Gimmy
Kathryn Gustafson
Gary R. Hilderbrand
Raymond Jungles
Christopher LaGuardia
Elizabeth K. Meyer
Charles Renfro
Michael Van Valkenburgh

MODERATORS:
Jane Amidon
Charles A. Birnbaum
Bradford McKee
Joeb Moore
Thaisa Way

LACES Continuing Education Units (CEUs) will be available.

Related events on Friday night (reception) and Saturday (tours) are sold-out, but registration for the conference ($275) is still available at the door on Friday.