Innovate: David Assael and David Basulto, founders of ArchDaily
Join David Assael and David Basulto, founders of the architecture publication, ArchDaily, in a talk cosponsored by the Latin GSD.
ArchDaily (http://www.archdaily.com) was founded in March 2008 with the goal of quickly delivering complete information to architects around the world, daily. Today, our mission has evolved: Our mission is to improve the quality of life of the next 3 billion people that will move into cities in the next 40 years, by providing inspiration, knowledge and tools to the architects who will have the challenge to design for them.
The editorial staff works on a daily basis to deliver specific and valuable content to the international architecture community; content that will allow architects to design for today’s challenges and tomorrow’s possibilities. ArchDaily has quickly established itself as one of the leading architectural websites in the world due to the staff’s meticulous understanding of what the audience is really looking for: tools, knowledge, and above all inspiration.
ArchDaily has editions in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese, with operations in Chile, China, United States, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia.
In 2013 ArchDaily received the Chilean National Award of Innovation from the Chile Government.
Additional Speakers:David Assael, David Basulto
Keller Easterling, “Extrastatecraft”
Architect/urbanist/writer Keller Easterling will address the theme of her book, Extrastatecraft (Verso, 2014): repeatable formulas such as spatial products and free zone cities make most of the space in the world. Some of the world’s most radical changes are being written in the language of this almost infrastructural spatial matrix. It generates de facto forms of polity that can outpace law, and it is the secret weapon of some of the world’s most powerful players. Infrastructure space is itself an information system—a spatial operating system for shaping the city. However unlikely it may seem, this space can bring to our art a new relevance, as well as additional aesthetic pleasures and political capacities.
Following Prof. Easterling’s talk, Charles Waldheim, John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture and chair of the Landscape Architecture Department, will join her in a conversation and moderate a discussion.
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office two weeks in advance at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected].
Jean-Louis Cohen, “The Art of Zigzag: Le Corbusiers Politics”
The concomitant publication in 2015 of three books about Le Corbusier, all of them critical of his ideological failings, triggered heated polemics focusing on his engagement with the leading political forces of the first half of the twentieth century. Yet the view held by these authors, for whom Le Corbusier was a man viscerally committed to far-right groups, does not stand up to a more comprehensive analysis of his political passions. Le Corbusier was also engaged in a cyclical flirtation with the Left and other forces. Perhaps the time has come to consider him less as an agent of political power than a manipulator who tried to exploit political powers in order to achieve his own architectural and urban goals.
Jean-Louis Cohen is Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at New York University, specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture and urbanism in Germany, France, Italy, Russia and North America, as well as contemporary issues in architecture, town planning, and landscape design. He is also a Chevalier des Arts & Lettres in France and a member of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome and the Russian Academy of Architecture. He is author of several books and was curator of the 2013 exhibition Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
Image: Le Corbusier, project for a monument to Paul Vaillant-Couturier, 1938, partial perspective view. © Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris.
Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the events office in advance at (617) 496-2414, or by email at [email protected].
Angela Glover Blackwell
Angela Glover Blackwell, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, of PolicyLink, started the organization in 1999 and continues to drive its mission of advancing economic and social equity. Under Ms. Blackwell’s leadership, PolicyLink has become a leading voice in the movement to use public policy to improve access and opportunity for all low-income people and communities of color, particularly in the areas of health, housing, transportation, education, and infrastructure. A lawyer by training, she gained national recognition as founder of the Oakland (CA) Urban Strategies Council, where she pioneered new approaches to neighborhood revitalization. As a leading voice in the movement for equity in America, Angela is a frequent commentator for some of the nation’s top news organizations, and she is the co-author of Uncommon Common Ground: Race and America’s Future. She serves on numerous boards and currently serves on The President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans.
Organized by the Joint Center for Housing Studies with support from the National Housing Endowment and the John T. Dunlop Professorship for Housing and Urbanization.
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office in advance at [email protected] or (617) 496-2414.
João Nunes
João Nunes is full Professor at the Architecture Academy of Mendrisio, and serves as Director of the Milan branch of the Master in Landscape Architecture program at the the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in Barcelona. In 2013 he was the first recipient of the Adalberto Libera Excellence Chair for Architecture [Trento University -Italy]. He is the founder and CEO of the Landscape Architecture Studio PROAP, which aims to work and research landscape through a multidisciplinary team and approach.
PROAP is a Landscape Architecture Studio, based in Lisbon, with agencies in Italy, Angola and local partners in China and Brazil. The work of the Studio ranges from landscape projects and studies, urban design, strategic landscape planning. PROAP became internationally known during the Lisbon Expo in 1998 for the Tejo Park and, since then, has realized projects in Portugal (Ribeira das Naus, Mondego Park, Cava do Viriato), Belgium (Antwerp Waterfront), Switzerland (Promenade des Crétes, PAV Etoile), Lebanon (Khan Antoun Bey Souk), Italy and Luxembourg.
Landscapes of memory, landscapes of forgetfulness
We are artisans of memory.
We are constructors of Future.
Landscapes are records of time.
As formidable books where, page after page, moment after moment, all the signs of the world are inscribed.
All the marks imprinted by the mechanisms which perform in the world, from footprints to atomic explosions, from gardens to cities, from minor walls to massive bridges.
That is the constructive process of landscape, the record, the keen continuous acceptance of imprints throughout the world, the process of combining them, of blending them, of, with them, producing something else altogether. And to recombine them again, sewed together in active metabolisms.
And if, in each moment, we are interested in the Image manifestation of that process, the spatial expression of that metabolism, the physiognomy in which that process consecrates, in that precise moment of our interest, it should interests us (as conscious actors of the process itself, as deciders of the evolution of that process, summarily, as architects) to know the rules of its functioning, the parameters of the mechanisms which draw them, the metabolic relations which constitute them.
As such, we recognize in each stone, in each form of the Earth, the echoes of the geological memory which shaped them, the imprints of the erosion mechanisms which have sculpted them, the remains of plants which have inhabited them, the records of animal footprints which have crossed it, and the men which, before us, have transformed it time and time again.
Landscapes are thick memories of Time and they are filled with Future, pregnant with the information that the mutations added throughout that time; they are the complex record of a transformation that describes, in each moment, what a landscape was and what presently is, what it possesses and, yet secretly, the sketch of the embryo of what shall be.
A codified genetic record which is not encapsulated in a synthetic determinism of a DNA, on the contrary, it is continuously written, vaguely conducted, remotely free, subliminally random, fulfilling, in each moment, the vacant instant between the Past and the Future.
And , in each layer of that thick time, there will be the condemnation to build, coherently, the continuity in that time.
Remembering or forgetting, celebrating or burying, consecrating or erasing, in the history of that construction, are the severe decisions to take in each moment.
In each gesture, in each day, in each project.
If Space and Time are the matter of landscape construction, Memory and Forgetfulness are the tools to its continuous transformation.
And the decision, conscious or not, of what to remember and what to forget, the continuous management of our memory, personal and collective, is the equation of the construction of the time line which appears inevitable and unique, but that is only one of the many possible paths between past and future.
A construction, a building, with every casual and random element which, in time, is configured.
And we cross, hesitant as blind men, the halls of that building, driven by the choice to remember or to forget, by the need to remember or to forget, cartesianly located in each moment of Time by that choice which draws, in the same selective manner, a Past and a Future.
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office in advance at [email protected] or (617) 496-2414.
Richard Tuttle
Richard Tuttle was born in Rahway, New Jersey in 1941, attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and his first paintings exhibited in New York shortly after graduation. He has become known for his small, intimate works made from a broad range of materials, both conventional and unconventional — including paper, unstretched canvas, galvanized tin, wood scraps, wire, fabric, string, and tree branches — presented in the form of sculptures, drawings, collages, prints, posters, and watercolors, but has occasionally made large-form works, such as a 150-foot-high glass-and-ceramic mural in Miami Beach. Inspired by architecture, philosophy, literature, and music, as well as color, materiality, and other elements of visual art, he has brought a poetic sensibility to explorations as varied as the relativeness of reality and the tensions between two and three dimensions. He lives in Maine, New Mexico, and New York.
Supported by the Rouse Visiting Artist Fund.
Image courtesy Imaging Department, Harvard Art Museums
Artwork © Richard Tuttle
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office in advance at [email protected] or (617) 496-2414.
Pei Zhu, “Kong – Inspiration from Nature and Tradition”
The design process in recent projects by Pei Zhu, of Studio Pei-Zhu (Beijing) has been inspired by the vocabulary of nature and natural forms but has resulted in an architecture that is divergent from nature and sometimes unnatural. Uninterested in a “formal equivalence” to natural vocabularies, Studio Pei-Zhu instead seeks a “dynamic equivalence” when working nature into an architectural concept. Different environments create different humanistic interpretations of landscape and space; Studio Pei-Zhu uses nature and environment to peel back the subjective influences of society—its politics, cultures, and religion—in an attempt to revert to basic human experiences. This allows Zhu to explore the fundamentals of how nature, as distinct from human intervention, influences architecture.
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office two weeks in advance at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected].
Additional Speakers:Pei Zhu
Loeb Fellowship 45th Anniversary Lecture: Swoon, On The Urban Impact of Collaborative Gestures
Caledonia Curry, who works under the name “Swoon,” is a classically trained artist and printmaker whose work explores the relationship between people and the built environment. From giant portraits that she wheat-pastes on buildings to large-scale architectural installations, her work is distinguished by its beauty and inventiveness, motivated by a cooperative spirit and compassion for the struggles of people in vulnerable situations. Her practice has been hailed as a model of creative leadership across disciplines.
As a response to the problem of global warming, Swoon and her collaborators made fantastical ships out of garbage, which they sailed down the Hudson and Mississippi Rivers and, in Europe, crossed the Adriatic Sea to the Venice Biennale. Her project to build houses in post-earthquake Haiti is titled “Konbit Shelter,” using the Haitian Creole word for cooperative community labor. She is currently collaborating with the arts initiative New Orleans Airlift to construct a musical house, Dithyrambalina.
The Loeb Fellowship has an extra reason to hail its anniversary this October: forty-five years of gathering mid-career practitioners for a transformative year at Harvard GSD. From October 22 to 24, 2015, Loeb alumni, representing the broadest spectrum of achievements, will convene from around the world in Cambridge to participate in an exchange of practices and to hear from great thinkers about design and equity in the resilient city.
See the schedule of public events.
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office in advance at [email protected] or (617) 496-2414.
Organization or Design? Giovanna Borasi
Further continuing the event “Symposium on Architecture: Organization or Design?” this event investigates how theories and systems of organization are conceived and enacted, and ponders their outcomes and disciplinary implications in design.
Giovanna Borasi is an architect and Chief Curator of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. At the CCA she has curated exhibitions and edited related books, with a particular focus on how environmental and social issues influence today’s urbanism and architecture. Among her exhibitions and books are Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture (2012); Journeys: How Travelling Fruit, Ideas, and Buildings Rearrange our Environment (2010); Sorry, Out of Gas: Architecture’s Response to the 1973 Oil Crisis (2007); and Environ(ne)ment: Approaches for Tomorrow (2006).
A diagram by Cedric Price for the Light Enclosures Unit illustrating how concepts of use vary between users’ requirements and producers’ provisions of inflatables, and where research could help. Date unknown
Cedric Price fonds, CCA
© CCA, Montréal
Farshid Moussavi, “The Function of Style”
What is the function of style today? If the 1970s were defined by Postmodernism and the 1980s by Deconstruction, how do we characterize the architecture of the 1990s to the present? Some built forms transmit affects of curvilinearity, others of crystallinity; some transmit multiplicity, others unity; some transmit cellularity, others openness; some transmit dematerialization, others weight. Does this immense diversity reflect a lack of common purpose? Farshid Moussavi will present the third volume in her “Function” series, The Function of Style, alongside projects of her London based firm, FMA, to argue that to see the coherence that underlies the diversity in contemporary architecture, style must be defined differently today, not as a representation but as a source of action through the political potency of affect.
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office in advance at [email protected] or (617) 496-2414.