Art and Architecture: 49 CITIES | Amale Andraos, Dan Wood, Stan Allen, Chip Lord, Kate Orff | Architectural Explorations in Books Series Event

FREE - Auditorium doors open at 5:30 p.m.

In celebration of the release of the cloth-bound third edition of 49 CITIES designed by the award winning designers Project Projects, special guests join acclaimed architects Amale Andraos and Dan wood for a provocative and informative discussion about the evolution and future of architecture in relation to city planning and urban development. 

Throughout history architects and planners have dreamed of “better” and different cities more controllable, more defensible, more efficient, more monumental, more organic, taller, denser, sparser or greener. With every plan, radical visions were proposed, ones that embodied not only the desires but also, and more often, the fears and anxieties of their time. Today, with the failure of the suburban experiment and the looming end-of-the world predictions—from global warming and waste to post-peak oil energy crises and uncontrolled world urbanization—architects and urbanists find themselves once more at a crossroad, fertile for visionary thinking. 

49 CITIES crunches the numbers of several centuries of visionary urbanism, from the ideal Roman city to SUPERSTUDIO’s Infinite Monument, in a call to re-engage cities as sites of experimental thinking.  In addition to enhanced, high-quality reproductions and illustrations, this cloth-bound third edition includes an interview between Amale Andraos, Dan Wood, Joseph Grima, and Archigram’s Michael Webb, an essay on The Death and Life of Urban Planning by Sam Jacob (founder of FAT Architecture) and new interviews with culture-defining architects Chip Lord (Ant Farm) and Yona Friedman. 

Advance copies of 49 CITIES (Inventory Press 2015) are available of purchase and signing at the end of event. 

WORKac, founded in 2003, is interested in positing architecture at the intersection of the urban, the rural and the natural. We embrace reinvention and collaborate with other fields to rethink architecture ‘in the world.’ In the face of overwhelming challenges and increasingly normative scenarios, we remain stubborn in our commitment to imagine alternate scenarios for the future of cities. We appropriate the more productive aspects of the urban discourse – from density and compression, to appropriateness of scale, the expression of intelligent and shared infrastructures, and a more careful integration between architecture, landscape and ecological systems – to bear upon architecture as we find shared concerns across our global practice. We hold unshakable lightness and polemical optimism as a means to move beyond the projected and towards the possible, an ambition with which we approach every project. 

WORKac has achieved international acclaim for projects such as the recently completed master plan for the New Holland Island Cultural Center in St. Petersburg, Russia, Wieden+Kennedy’s 50,000 sq ft, three story New York offices, the Blaffer Museum in Houston, Texas, the Children’s Museum of the Arts in Manhattan and the Edible Schoolyard at P.S. 216 in Gravesend, Brooklyn. Currently, in Africa, the firm is building its winning competition entry for a new 20,000 square meter Conference Center in Libreville, Gabon. Targeting LEED Gold certification, the project is expected to be completed in 2016 and will host diplomatic meetings, including the next African Union summit for heads-of-state. In the United States, WORKac is designing the new home for the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in downtown Brooklyn; an expansion of the Museum of Sex in Manhattan; and a new storefront facade for a parking garage in Miami’s Design District. In China, the firm recently completed a 2,000-acre master plan for seven new university campuses in Weifang, in collaboration with SCAPE, SLAB and Studio Zhu-Pei. The office is currently working on an invited competition entry for the 2019 Beijing International Horticultural Exposition with the same team.

Stan Allen is an architect working in New York and George Dutton ’27 Professor of Architecture at Princeton University. From 2002 to 2012 he was Dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton.  He holds degrees from Brown University, The Cooper Union, and Princeton. His architectural firm SAA/Stan Allen Architect has realized buildings and urban projects in the United States, South America, and Asia. Responding to the complexity of the modern city in creative ways, Stan Allen has developed an extensive catalogue of innovative design strategies, in particular looking at field theory, landscape architecture, and ecology as models to revitalize the practice of architecture. His most recent book is Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain, published in 2011.

Originally trained as an architect, Chip Lord is a media artist who works with video and digital photography. As a member of the alternative architecture and art collective, Ant Farm (1968-1978), he produced the video art classics Media Burn and The Eternal Frame as well as the Cadillac Ranch roadside sculpture in Amarillo, Texas. The Berkeley Art Museum organized a retrospective traveling exhibition of Ant Farm in 2003 and the show toured to the Institute of  Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and other museums. Since 1978 Lord has worked independently and in collaboration producing video installations and single channel video works. His creative practice straddles documentary and experimental genres often mixing the two, and his works have been shown at numerous film and video festivals including the Tokyo Video Festival, The London Film Festival; and the Berlin Film Festival to name a few. Additionally his films have shown in Museums including the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum; LACMA, Los Angeles; The La Jolla Museum of Art; The Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Spain; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Lord’s interest in architecture and urban public space has led to the production of a series of works in video that document and explore issues that engae with urban geography and planning. The latest piece in this series, El Centro del Mundo, is an interactive DVD installation.

Kate Orff is a landscape architect and founder of SCAPE. She directs the design of all SCAPE projects from schematic design to implementation, and brings a focus of larger systematic thinking to the work of the firm. Through her creative leadership of the firm, Kate focuses on retooling landscape architecture relative to global challenges of climate change and social and environmental justice, which she has explored through publications, planning, and built work. Kate Orff is also the Director of the Urban Design Program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she teaches graduate design studios and interdisciplinary seminars focused on sustainable development, biodiversity, and community-based change. She is the co-author of Petrochemical America (Aperture Foundation, 2012) and co-editor of Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park (Princeton, 2011). She was named a National Academician in 2013, A United States Artist in 2012,  one of “50 for the Future of Design” by H&G, a Dwell Magazine “Design Leader” and was featured in “Front Runners: 25 Young Designers Leading The Pack” by Azure Magazine. In 2015, Kate received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture, which recognizes an American architect whose work is characterized by a strong personal direction.

In its seventh year Architectural Explorations in Books, initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni, is a series of engaging programs delving into the critical role that architecture publications play in the understanding of contemporary urban developments and structures. The events feature book presentations and discussions by acclaimed architects, critics, curators, designers, photographers and writers.

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