Lecture @ Columbia Planning 11/24
I am lecturing tomorrow on Complexity and Contradiction in Infrastructure in the Lectures in Planning Series of the Program in Urban Planning at Columbia University, starting at 1pm, 114 Avery Hall.
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Slow Infrastructure
In a bizarre misinterpretation of Michael Pollan’s advocacy of slow food, the Obama administration has decided to pursue slow infrastructure.
No, this doesn’t mean funding more freeways in Los Angeles, I’m kidding about the Pollan reference, it does mean stalling on infrastructure yet again because it isn’t politically expedient and doesn’t benefit his main supporters in the world of finance: investment banks and health insurance companies.
See here.
Note to doe-eyed newspaper reporters who want OMA-designed windmills to view from their villas in Catalina Island. It just isn’t going to happen! Not under this regime, at least.
Bill Moyers At His Best
This is Bill Moyers at his best. It must have slipped past the guards at PBS, but its really fantastic, a spot on indictment of Congress. Can I have a third party now to counter the party on the far Right and the party on the extreme Right? Please?
YouTube - Bill Moyers on Max Baucus and Senate health insurance reform bill
First Works at the AA
Unfortunately I won’t have a chance to see this show, but I had the chance to contribute a brief piece on Archizoom’s “Structure for Leisure in Prato–Permanent Luna Park in a Shopping Centre” to the catalogue for First Works: Emerging Architectural Experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s, now on display the AA.
The show explores the first projects that architects of that era (Archigram, Archizoom, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Peter Eisenman, Norman Foster + Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Steven Holl, Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Rafael Moneo, Morphosis, Renzo Piano, Cedric Price, Aldo Rossi, Alvaro Siza, Bernard Tschumi, Robert Venturi and Paul Virilio + Claude Parent) did in setting out on their careers.
The Stationary State
A friend I’ve known for over two decades, Gopal Balakrishnan, has an incisive Marxist critique of the contemporary economy in “Speculations on the Stationary State” at the latest New Left Review. I’m delighted that the article appears to be free for all to read at the moment. Read it here.
Daniel Miller on the Post City
Over at Metamute, I ran into Daniel Miller’s article “On the Post City.” Metamute is a favorite site and I was delighted to see mention of my work on One Wilshire in the last paragraph. Piece by piece, a critique of network culture and what is rapidly becoming its latest ideological tool, networked urbanism, is emerging.
Infrastructure of Urban Ecologies
William Morrish and I are speaking at 6:30 today at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. See Columbia’s Web site for details. Morrish is the Dean of Constructed Environments at Parsons. The lecture will be up on Columbia’s iTunes podcast soon afterwards.
Infrastructural City @ IUAV Monday
I’m in Venice, Italy where I’m honored to be giving the keynote lecture at one of the most important and historical venues in my field, the IUAV, the school at which the great historian Manfredo Tafuri taught (among many other luminaries). The Web site for the conference “Pipes and Sponges: Reconceptualizing Mobility Infrastructures” can be found here. Among the other speakers is Ed Soja, a key influence on the Infrastructural City. I’m greatly honored and looking forward to seeing everyone there.
D-Crit: Network Culture: A Changing Context for Design
I am giving an overview of my Network Culture book project at the D-Crit program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City at 6 tonight.
See their site for more.
Event Information
When: 13 Oct 2009, 6:00–8:00 p.m.
Where: Design Criticism MFA Department, 136 West 21st Street, New York, 2nd floor
Price: Free and open to the public
Places at the Design Observer
Great news. The illustrious architecture and urban studies journal Places is undergoing some major changes. First, it is now edited by Nancy Levinson, one of the most distinguished editors in our field. Second, it is now hosted at Design Observer, which needs little introduction to my readership. I expect big things and am eager to dive into the first issue, which just went online here.
I have two connections with the first issue that I wanted to share with you.
The first is an excellent essay by one of my favorite former students, Ian Baldwin from the University of Pennsylvania, on the Tube Map of London. Read more here. I was amused to run into Ian’s article via my favorite fashion blog, Selectism, which had a piece on it today.
The second is a great review of the Infrastructural City by Chris Reed of Stoss, found here. Chris really “got” the book and what we were trying to do with it. I’m very much looking forward to meeting Chris at the GSD next Monday.
