Event overview
Spatial Practices
Guest Speaker: Teddy Cruz, respondent/moderator Adrian Lahoud
Where is our collective imagination?
While in the last years the global city became the primary site of economic consumption and display, local neighborhoods in the margins of such centers of economic power remained sites of cultural production. These are peripheral communities where new socio-economic configurations are taken place through tactical adaptation and retrofit of existing discriminating zoning and exclusionary economic development in the contemporary city.
These communities’ stealth urban praxis needs artistic interpretation and political representation and this is the space of intervention my practice engages within the specificity of the political at the US-Mexico border: The conflict between top down urban policy and bottom up social contingency. A new political language emerges from this collision, with particular spatial consequences from which to produce new interpretations of infrastructure, property and citizenship.
This period of crisis represents yet another opportunity to imagining spatial procedures, political and economic protocols that can re-calibrate the ethical imperative between individuals, collectives and institutions in co-producing the city. Without altering the exclusionary policies that have been enabling a selfish, oil-hungry urban development in the last years, architects will continue being subordinated to mere decorators of exclusionary urbanization.
TEDDY CRUZ was born in Guatemala City. He obtained a Master in Design Studies at Harvard University in 1997 and established his research-based architecture practice in San Diego, California in 2000. He has been recognized internationally for his urban research of the Tijuana-San Diego border. In 1991, he received the prestigious Rome Prize in Architecture and in 2005 he was the first recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize. His work has been profiled in important publications including The New York Times, Domus and Harvard Design Magazines. In 2008, he represented the US in the Venice Architecture Biennial and his work was recently included in Small Scale, Big Change exhibition at MoMA. He is currently a professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego, where he co-founded CUE / Center for Urban Ecologies.
ADRIAN LAHOUD is an architect, urban designer and researcher. Through private practice, teaching and research, he explores the disputed, conflicting and often paradoxical transformations of cities. In 2010 he edited a special issue of Architectural Design titled Post-traumatic Urbanism. Forthcoming in 2012 is Project for a Mediterranean Union on speculative transport, energy and media infrastructure in North Africa and the Middle East. His architectural work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. In 2011, his work was exhibited at the Prague Quadrennial, Gwangju Design Biennale Seoul curated by Ai Weiwei. His theoretical research work explores the problem of scale in architecture. In 2012 he will be Guest Curator for the Think Space Competition Cycle - Past Forward.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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31 May 2012 | 5:00pm - 8:00pm |
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