Richard Sennett, “Stages and Streets: Where Performances Happen and Why They Happen Where They Happen”

Speaker

Richard Sennett began life as a professional cellist. He then became a writer on cities, combining architecture with the social sciences. His new book, The Performer: life, art, politics puts together the two strands of his experience. In addition to The Performer, Richard Sennett is author of The Fall of Public Man, Flesh and Stone, The Corrosion of Character, and The Craftsman.

Dan Stubbergaard, “City as a Resource – Cobe’s Current Works on the City”

Speaker

Dan Stubbergaard, who is trained as an architect from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, in Copenhagen, founded Cobe in 2006. Inspired by the transformation of Copenhagen from an industrial port city to a beacon for livability and sustainability, he is the leading figure in Cobe’s work to create surroundings that actively contribute to extraordinary everyday life. Stubbergaard believes architects have a profound responsibility to create resilient, long-term solutions that improve life–cities, buildings, and landscapes that are made to outlast our generation.

His research focuses on investigating solutions, tools, and methodologies across several topics or themes of interest, including resilient urban development, green mobility, transformation and reuse, new ways of building, social responsibility, urban nature, and longevity. Having received national and international acclaim for his work, including the C.F. Hansen Royal Medal from the Danish Academy Council in 2020, Nykredit’s Architecture Award in 2012, and the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2006, he has designed and completed award-winning projects globally. Two projects of significant note are the Nordhaven project (Copenhagen, DK) from 2009 onwards that effectively converted a former industrial shipyard into an arguably more sustainable urban district with pedestrian and bike-friendly infrastructure, and the Paper Island project of 2016 to 2023 (Copenhagen, DK), the conversion of a former industrial site into a vibrant inner-city neighborhood, and with skillful handling of different building scales and elements of the public realm. What is particularly impressive in his projects is the consistency with which he deals with integrating the potential of landscape as an organizing instrument, creating humane environments, privileging reuse and repair as a strategy and developing compelling narratives through systemic thinking.

Elizabeth K. Meyer, “Unsettling Sustainability – Landscape Laboratories as Experimental and Experiential Grounds”

Event Description

Meyer, the inaugural faculty director of the University of Virginia’s transdisciplinary Morven Sustainability Lab, will present an overview of how landscape architectural design thinking is at the core of the strategic planning process for this 3000-acre rural landscape on the peri-urban edge of Charlottesville. She will describe how the socio-ecological history of this former plantation and indigenous tribal lands is shaping future research questions, student engagement programs and community collaborations. Additionally, Meyer will share a vision for the Morven Sustainability Lab that positions it within the context of a new generation of landscape labs where landscape architects—working with architects, planners, anthropologists, scientists, and environmental humanities scholars—are co-creating living learning landscapes capable of inspiring a new generation of caring climate activists.

Speaker

Elizabeth K. Meyer, FASLA, is a landscape architectural professor at the University of Virginia where she has served as Department Chair and Dean of the School of Architecture. First, as a practitioner working with EDAW and Hanna/Olin and consulting with MVVA on sites such as the National Zoo, the GW Parkway, Bryant Park, Wellesley College campus, UVA’s central grounds, the St. Louis Gateway Arch grounds, and the White House Grounds, and since the late 1980s as an academic, Meyer has been involved with cultural landscapes that entangle social histories and ecological processes. Her expertise has been recognized through appointments to the US Commission of Fine Arts and the Dumbarton Oaks Garden and Landscape Studies Senior Fellows. In 2023, Meyer received the Thomas Jefferson Award, the highest scholarly honor bestowed on UVA faculty. For the next four years, as the inaugural faculty director of UVA’s Morven Sustainability Lab , Meyer will lead a multidisciplinary, all-university cohort of faculty, staff, and community members to shape research, teaching, and community engagement programs for a 3000-acre rural property on the periphery of Charlottesville that acknowledge the site’s complicated history while reimagining the site’s future.

Daniel Fernández Pascual, “Being Shellfish: Architectures of Intertidal Cohabitation”

Event Description

Tidal zones are liminal spaces that challenge the ecological, legal and financial thresholds of coastal areas. They appear, disappear, reappear, and constantly change in size and chemistry, while shaped by new human-made seasons of wetland draining and ocean pollution. Following CLIMAVORE, a framework that investigates ways of metabolizing climate breakdown, these littoral spaces are at the core of entanglements between risk and social security, profit margins and contamination struggles, geological processes and weather events; between what is used and what is refused. Thinking with waste seashells and beach-cast seaweeds allows us to expand the possibilities of caring for coastal ecologies, while sensing and monitoring human actions affecting them. As awareness about the environmental footprint of construction and the ‘mitigation’ of its associated toxicities increases, transitions to other forms of building may connect to materials from intertidal origin that can also contribute to addressing the broken food chain. Seaweeds and bivalves have been key in human and nonhuman diets, and used as building substrate across geographies over millennia. Their role in providing nourishment and shelter has supported coastal dwellers to invent unique forms of collective usership through cultivation, harvest, sourcing, processing; and building techniques such as thatching, cladding, insulation, and plastering. Both ingredient and material, they can advance an architecture for the tidal commons.

Speaker

Daniel Fernández Pascual is Senior Research Fellow and one of the Principal Investigators at CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA. He holds an MArch from ETSA Madrid, an MSc in Urban Design from TU Berlin and Tongji University Shanghai, and a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2013 he co-founded Cooking Sections with Alon Schwabe. Based in London, their work explores systems that organize the world through food. Using installation, performance, mapping and video, their research-based practice operates within the overlapping boundaries of architecture, visual culture and ecology. Since 2015 Cooking Sections are working on multiple iterations of the long-term CLIMAVORE project, exploring how to eat as humans change climates. Cooking Sections was part of the exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Their work has also been exhibited at Los Angeles Public Art Triennial; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery Columbia GSAPP, New York; P.5 New Orleans Triennial; Sharjah Architecture Triennial; Tate Britain and Serpentine Galleries, London; Manifesta12, Palermo; Storefront for Art & Architecture, New York; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; SALT, Istanbul; and have been residents in Headlands Center for the Arts, California; and The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London. Published books include The Empire Remains Shop (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2018), Salmon: A Red Herring (isolarii, 2020) and Offsetted (Hatje Cantz, 2022).

Timothy Archambault, “The Silent Echo: Architectures of the Void”

Event Description

Architect, composer, and musician Archambault will give a lecture on the symbiotic relationship between the void, Indigenous and Modern Architecture, Music Archaeology, and the process of revitalizing traditions within Indigenous flute music. The lecture concludes with a flute performance showcasing a synthesis of tradition and innovation, incorporating existential themes. Join us for an enriching experience that delves into cultural retrieval, the interconnectedness of space, and the enduring power of sound.

Speaker

Timothy Archambault, a Miami-based polymath with over 30 years of international architectural experience, serves as the Director of Americas for Oppenheim Architecture. While acquiring degrees in architecture and fine arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, he studied music theory at Brown University. Before joining Oppenheim Architecture, Archambault contributed to significant projects with OMA, including the MahaNakhon Tower (Bangkok), the Prada NY store, and the Lehmann Maupin Gallery (NY). Additional notable projects encompass the Wyly Theatre (Dallas) with OMA/REX Architecture, the Walt Disney Concert Hall (LA), and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao with Frank O. Gehry & Associates.

Beyond his architectural achievements, Archambault is an Indigenous flutist and composer. His repertoire includes twentieth-century Indigenous music, contemporary Indigenous compositions, and traditional Canadian Algonquin flute songs. Several of his recordings are archived in the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Archambault is the Hereditary Senator of the Kichesipirini Algonquin First Nation, a member of the Métis Nation of Quebec, and the First Nations Composers Initiative. He co-founded thecreativedestruction, a contemporary art collaborative with his wife, CYJO, and co-edited the Encyclopedia of Native American Music of North America.

 

This event is part of ArtsThursdays , a university-wide initiative supported by Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA).

Lauret Savoy, “Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape”

Event Description

Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us is also a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. Lauret Savoy’s Trace interweaves journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time to explore how this country’s still unfolding history has marked the land, this society, and her. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds to names on the land, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often-unvoiced presence of the past. Lauret will offer elements from this book and introduce her current project on the Chesapeake region. The new work braids histories of the land and of “race” using as a lens her search for ancestors, lives entwined by converging diasporas from Africa, Indigenous America, and the Indian Ocean basin with immigrants from Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their stories are entangled with the rise and fall of tobacco agriculture and the origin and growth of the capital city along the Potomac River. Lauret delves through fragmented histories—geological, personal, cultural—to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. She asks, what is your relationship with history, told and untold, on this land?

Speaker

Lauret Savoy‘s research and writing consider how the nation’s ever-unfolding history has marked the land and people. Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape won the 2016 American Book Award; it was a finalist for PEN American and additional honors. Her other books include The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World and Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology, named one of the “Five Best” science books in the Wall Street Journal. Lauret writes of the complex intertwinings of natural and cultural histories to understand the American land’s origins—and the stories we tell of ourselves in this land. A woman of African American, Euro-American, and Indigenous heritages, Lauret is the David B. Truman Professor of Environmental Studies & Geology at Mount Holyoke College.  Winner of Mount Holyoke’s Distinguished Teaching Award and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, Lauret has also held fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution and Yale University.  She is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and a pilot.

 

This program is co-sponsored by the GSD, the Environment Forum at the Mahindra Humanities Center , and the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.

 

Debra Spark, “Falling Out: Narrating the Neutra-Schindler Story”

Event Description

A fiction writer whose “day job” includes freelance writing for shelter magazines, Debra Spark will talk about how an article for Dwell led to her desire to tell the story of the Richard Neutra/Rudolph Schindler friendship, collaboration, and falling out. A Writer-at-Work type discussion, she’ll describe the writing and research of this particular piece, touching on earlier architectural historians, present-day filmmakers, and both men’s heirs.

Speaker

Debra Spark is the award-winning author of five novels, including the upcoming Discipline; two collections of short stories; two books of essays on fiction writing; and editor/co-editor of two anthologies. Her book reviews, short fiction, articles, op-eds, and essays have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, Food and Wine, Harvard Review, Maine Magazine, New England Review, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yankee, among other places. She spent a decade writing about home, art, and design for Maine Home+Design, Decor Maine, Down East, Dwell, Elysian, Interiors Boston, New England Home, and Yankee. She now writes a regular book review column of French books in English translation for Frenchly.us.  

Spark is the Zacamy Professor of English at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She has been the recipient of several awards and grants, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College. 

 

 

 

Petra Blaisse, “Art Applied, Inside Outside”: In Conversation with Grace La, Niels Olsen, and Fredi Fischli

Event Description

Designer Petra Blaisse discusses her forthcoming publication Art Applied, Inside Outside (2024), a kaleidoscopic view of her work across interior, exhibition, and landscape design over three decades. This comprehensive survey encompasses renowned projects, including the recently completed Taipei Performing Arts Center; the Kunsthal Rotterdam; Biblioteca degli Alberi in Milan, a park spanning almost ten hectares; and LocHal Library in Tilburg, a vast factory repurposed using an architecture of semitranslucent curtains. Joining the conversation are the GSD’s Grace La, Chair of the Department of Architecture; Niels Olsen, John Portman Design Critic in Architecture; and Fredi Fischli, John Portman Design Critic in Architecture.

Speaker

Petra Blaisse, Inside Outside’s lead designer, works in a multitude of creative areas including interior design, landscape architecture, exhibition and textile design. After an education in the visual arts and work for commercial photographers and filmers she became assistant curator at the Applied Arts department of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1986 she became free-lance exhibition designer.

While realizing a series of experimental installations and exhibitions with the Rotterdamse Kunststichting (1988) and OMA (1987-1992), Blaisse’s assignments extended to the architectural field, where her focus on interior interventions (material, colour, light) and large-scale curtains developed, parallel to her life-long passion for gardening. After a two-year period of practical schooling in the early 90’s to gain botanical knowledge, Blaisse decided to add garden design to her practice.

Since 2016 Inside Outside is led by Blaisse and partners Aura Luz Melis (architect) and Jana Crepon (landscape architect) in collaboration with long-time colleague Peter Niessen (fashion designer). The studio specializes in the creation of dynamic, ever-changing environments of various levels of complexity, both inside and outside.

 

 

Jack Halberstam, “Trans* Anarchitectures 1975 to 2020”

 

International Womxn’s Week includes a weeklong series of events organized by Womxn in Design that gather members of the GSD community to learn about and challenge notions of gender and power from within the framework of design.

Celebrating Trans In Design’s (TID) inaugural lecture as a new student organization, TID has organized this year’s International Women’s Week Keynote Address, welcoming Jack Halberstam, to explore the impact that trans artist and designers have in expanding the field.

Event Description

My work on anarchitecture and collapse began, predictably perhaps, with an encounter with the work of artist Gordon Matta Clark from the 1970’s. Matta Clark’s work, his cuts and splits and spirals, the gaps that he built into abandoned warehouses, homes and offices, left behind a vocabulary with which to describe not progress or becoming, not development and building, but the unraveling, chaotic, messy forms that voracious real estate development leaves in its wake and that in turn offers an opposition to gentrification, real estate capital, normative embodiment, and individual success. When we return to the an/architectural experiments of GMC, we can find traces of earlier, potentially more radical projects than those that came to be compatible with liberal capitalism and we find them speaking in the language of unbuilding, breaking, cutting, collapsing, opening, dismantling. This lexicon has become potent in an era of real estate domination, market economies, profit domination. But what does it have to do with transness? A group of trans artists including Jesse Darling but also Yve Laris Cohen and Cassils all utilize anarchitectural vocabularies on behalf of theories of trans embodiment that emphasize the cut of surgical transformation, the demolition of the binary, the twisting of bodily forms away from the perfect and the true.

Speaker

Jack Halberstam is the David Feinson Professor of The Humanities at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press).  Halberstam’s latest book, 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled: Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse. Halberstam was recently the subject of a short film titled “So We Moved” by Adam Pendleton which played at MoMA NYC until January 30, 2022.

 

This event is co-sponsored by the GSD, Trans in Design, and Womxn in Design.

 

POSTPONED: Christina Sharpe, “What Could a Vessel Be?”

Event Description

2/5/24: This event has been postponed. Please check back soon for further updates. 

What Could a Vessel Be? is an ongoing consideration of the vessel as idea, concept and material, in order to try to attend to and make sense of the multiple and overlapping crises of our time. What is or might a vessel be in a time of catastrophe?

Speaker

Christina Sharpe is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being; Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects and most recently, Ordinary Notes , which was named a finalist of the National Book Award in nonfiction and named a best book of 2023 by The New Yorker, the New York Times and NPR, among others. She is currently Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Department of Humanities at York University, Toronto.

 

This event is co-sponsored by the GSD and The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.