Friday, April 13
4:30 p.m. Registration opens
5 p.m. Welcome and introductions
5:30 p.m. Keynote
Last Round Urban Ecology
Alfredo Brillembourg, Urban-Think Tank and ETH
6:15 p.m. Keynote
Creative Acts of Citizenship: The Informal as Practice
Teddy Cruz, Estudio Teddy Cruz and University of California–San Diego
7:30 p.m. Reception in Milstein Hall Crit Dome
Saturday, April 14
8:30 a.m. Registration and coffee
8:45 a.m. Introductions
9 a.m. SESSION 1: VISIBILITY
What potential material or programmatic logic of the existing city is encountered/constructed through the project? How are "problems" or "opportunities" defined, identified, mapped? What methods of observation, analysis, representation, and definition/action were challenged? How must the designer's traditional tools of recognition, analysis, and understanding change, dilate or adapt?
Moderated by Caroline O'Donnell, Assistant Professor, Richard Meier Professorship of Architecture, Department of Architecture, Cornell University
Architect as Detective, Narrator and Craftsperson
Maurice Mitchell, Department of Architecture and Spatial Design, London Metropolitan University
Mini and Many: Drawing Actions that Shape the City
Sabine Müller, SMAQ
Data Sequence: Communicating Science, Society, and Policy of Places by Exposing the Invisible
Sarah Williams, Columbia University Spatial Information Design Lab
11:15 a.m. SESSION 2: TACTICS
How is the "site" of work defined? What broader systemic relations does the project/prototype aim at? How are existing organizations or structures appropriated, redirected, reconfigured? How does the project (re)define the means and methods of design: local knowledge, agents, logics, material and spatial practices constituent in the project; techniques used to intervening in existing conditions; disciplinary procedures used vis-á-vis everyday materials and forces to hand, and resistances encountered; ways of deploying traditional and/or new technologies; in-situ experimentation, demonstration, testing; parameters of/basis for decision-making (agency, authority, knowledge exchange); assemblage of individual and/or institutional actors involved?
Moderated by Milton S. F. Curry, Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Architecture, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan
Slum Networking
Priti Parikh, Development Vision 2020, Imperial College Business School
Pragmatism in Practice
Richard Dobson, Asiye eTafuleni and Warwick Junction Urban Renewal Project
A Dry Toilet in Caracas and a Community Garden in Amsterdam: A Vision of the Future City and the Artist as Mediator
Marjetica Potrč, University of Fine Arts Hamburg
2 p.m. Keynote
Bits and Atoms
Neil Gershenfeld, MIT Center for Bits and Atoms
3:15 p.m. SESSION 3: TEMPORALITIES
How does the design work define its role and operation with respect to the dynamics of the contemporary city? On the one hand: how does the project address or accommodate urban contingencies, practices, and processes, both known and unknowable? For example, how does it provide a framework or vehicle for adaptation, transformation, mutation, appropriation; what ways of working, investigating, acting does the project deploy — processual or anticipatory. Alternatively: how has the work of the project become redefined in time by city inhabitants? How has it transformed or been transformed by its context, or develop additional layers of meaning and functionality; how have material changes, technologies, practices or ecologies introduced through the work been adapted and deployed over time by intended or unintended users.
Moderated by Jeremy Foster, Assistant Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture, Cornell University
Provisional Practice
Rupali Gupte, Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture
Spatial Practice of Public Space
Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Atelier Bow Wow, Tokyo Institute of Technology
The Camp as Political Project
Alessandro Petti, Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency, Al-Quds/Bard College Jerusalem
4:30 p.m. Discussion
5:30 p.m. Keynote and summary
Moderated by Neema Kudva, Associate Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University
Kinetic City
Rahul Mehrotra, Department of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard GSD
Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium, 2012
Additional support provided by: The Institute for Social Sciences and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies