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This event will be conducted in-person in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery and through Zoom. Zoom account registration is required, please register in advance here.

In conjunction with the exhibition Conceiving the Plan: Nuance and Intimacy in the Construction of Civic Space, In Honor of Diane Lewis (1951 –2017), the School of Architecture will host a daylong symposium, Nuance and Intimacy in Civic Space, in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery on Saturday, April 9, from 10 am to 3 pm. This four-part program will include project presentations by individuals who contributed to the exhibition and discussions addressing critical questions in the conception of civic space.

In a series of post-2020 civic architecture projects for different sites, Conceiving the Planinaugurates a dialogue with the legacy of the late architect and longtime Cooper Union Professor Diane Lewis AR’76. It asks the following questions: How can civic spaces be imbued with nuance? In what ways does such a quality persist in the city? Can one discuss intimacy in architectural terms? In her built and unbuilt works, teaching, and writing, Diane Lewis upheld the capacity of architecture to profoundly and intimately embody our collective life. For Lewis, the city was not only the result of a great number of inextricable historical strata of form and memory, it was also a proposition about a moral and ethical life together. She approached the city as a mental universe all its own, greater than the sum of its individual architectures. Her unique presence—her unmistakable voice—is among the most characteristic distillations of the architectural “message” of The Cooper Union from the 1970s to the mid-2010s.

PROGRAM

Introductory Remarks – 10 am

Welcome: Yael Hameiri Sainsaux AR’10
Host: Elena Fanna AR’03

A Brief Introduction to the Pedagogy of Diane Lewis: Peter Lynch AR’84

Panel One – 10:20-11:20 am
Conceiving the Plan: The Ethical Question

Moderator: Guido Zuliani

Laila Seewang AR’05, Uri Wegman AR’08, The Siskiyou Trail: A Right to Return, Portland

Sotirios Kotoulas AR’03, Star Stories, Winnipeg, Treaty 1

Catherine Ann Somerville Venart, Trading, Tracing, and Telling: The Alchemies of Exchange,
Amsterdam

Dorian Wiszniewski, Parasituation [Edinburgh] – Waverley Gardens

Panel Two – 11:30 am-12:30 pm
The City and the House: What is Civic?

Moderator: Nader Tehrani

Dieter Dietz and Aurélie Dupuis, Landscape as a Support, Geneva

Mersiha Veledar AR’03, Healing Object: Unmasking Novel Domestic Urbanism, New York

Preston Scott Cohen, The City in the House

Pippo Ciorra, Will We Live Together? Redeeming the Hotel House Ghetto Tower into the Ideal
Vertical Village, Porto Recanti

Lunch Break

Panel Three – 1:30-2:30 pm
Nuance and Intimacy

Moderator: Elisabetta Terragni

Holger Kleine AR’90, TS 1: A Talking Station for Tempelhofer Feld, Berlin

David Turnbull, Angel Alley, London

Georg Windeck, Time Clouds: Playground and Archeology Garden, Athens

Peter Lynch AR’84, Anna Asplind, and Martin Heidesjö, Timescape Garden, Syltenberget,
Norrköping

Panel Four – 2:35-3:00 pm
Roundtable

Moderator: Elena Fanna

Anna Kostreva AR’09, Notes from Rome (1977)

This event is free and open to the public.