REMOTE LECTURE
Neeraj Bhatia: New Investigations in Collective Form

Tuesday, April 28
Web/Zoom | 6:30PM

Today, society continues to face urban challenges – from economic inequality to a progressively fragile natural environment – that, in order to be addressed, require us to come together in a moment when what we collectively value is increasingly difficult to locate. New Investigations in Collective Form presents a group of design experiments by the design-research office The Open Workshop, that test how architecture can empower the diverse voices that make up the public realm and the environments in which they exist. Organized into five themes for producing collectivity – Frameworks, Articulated Surfaces, the Living Archive, Re-Wiring States, and Commoning – the projects straddle the fine line between the individual and collective, informal and formal, choice and control, impermanent and permanent.

The lecture presents work from the eponymous book which contains contributions by: Neeraj Bhatia, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Peggy Deamer, Clare Lyster, Keith Krumwiede, Jenny Odell, Albert Pope, Rafi Segal, and Charles Waldheim.

The lecture will be followed by a public live panel discussion including Neeraj Bhatia, Peggy Deamer and Keith Krumwiede moderated by Nora Akawi.

This lecture will be aired on The Cooper Union website  starting at 6:30PM, followed by a public Zoom discussion starting at 7:00PM. Please register in advance  here . Zoom account registration is required. 
REMOTE 2020 ELEANORE PETTERSEN LECTURE
Mabel O. Wilson: Bulletproofing America's Public Space - Race, Remembrance, and Emmett Till 

Wednesday, April 29
Web/Zoom | 6:30PM

Compelling architectural and urban designs like the recent Memorial to Peace and Justice by MASS Design Group have been erected to aid the public in remembering the historic and geographic scope of America’s legacy of racial violence. As architects, planners, urbanists, and historians how do we commemorate America’s fraught history when recent protests by the white nationalist group Unite the Right at historic sites like the University of Virginia, or the need to bulletproof a historical marker at an important site of the Civil Rights struggle tells us that violence still simmers and erupts in the nation's public spaces? 

Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor in Architecture and also a professor in African American and African Diasporic Studies at Columbia University. She also serves as the Associate Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and co-directs Global Africa Lab. She has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2017) and Negro Building: African Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012). She co-edited with Irene Cheng and Charles Davis the recently published volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). With her practice Studio &, she is a collaborator in the architectural team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia. For MoMA, she is co-curator of the forthcoming exhibition Reconstructions: Blackness and Architecture in America. She’s a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?) a collective that advocates for fair labor practices on building sites worldwide.

This event is co-presented with The Architectural League of New York.

This lecture will be aired on The Cooper Union website  starting at 6:30PM, followed by a public Zoom discussion starting at 7:30PM. Please register in advance  here . Zoom account registration is required.