SVA MFA in Design Criticism
counter/point: The 2013 D-Crit Conference Saturday, May 11, 2013
SVA Theatre 333 West 23rd Street New York City
dcrit.sva.edu/conference2013 @dcritconference #dcrit2013
Introduction Some people think that being a critic is a lonely line of work. Not only is writing a solitary occupation, they surmise, but criticism, which seeks to disrupt prevailing opinion and ask the awkward questions, will be isolating. The truth is—as any D-Crit student will tell you from their desk in the middle of our openplan writing studio—that criticism is in fact very social. After we’ve attended the community meetings, consulted the experts, and conducted on-the-ground interviews on the issue we’re writing about; after we’ve met the designers and the manufacturers, test-driven their products, and toured their sites; we then enter new dialogues with our editors and producers, and finally our publics. These publics include the actual audiences for our work—those who talk back to us through letters, comments, heckling, questions, their design work, or their own pieces of criticism— but also the imagined ones. The public we conjure as we write may be as small as a single reader—a designer, manufacturer, policy maker, patron, consumer, or our mom—and as large as a whole body of citizens we feel needs protecting, admonishing, enlightening, or empowering. And beyond all these conversations that frame and feed into the act of criticism, there is yet another interaction to acknowledge. As critics, we write in response to other critics that have gone before us. Whether we write about beauty, truth, or social good in relation to nail-clippers, Bruce Mau, or the Freedom Tower, we enter a discourse about that topic which is already in full flow. We must steer through this intellectual cocktail party of critics using our unique line of argument to guide us, yet referencing and refuting as we go, in acknowledgement of the perspectives of our peers and predecessors. It is this aspect of criticism that members of the SVA MFA Design Criticism Class of 2013 draw our attention to through their selection of the title “counter/point” for the fourth annual D-Crit conference. In music, the term “counterpoint” refers to the relationship
between voices that are each independent in rhythm and pitch, yet together are harmonically interwoven. As individual critics with distinct writerly voices and divergent subject specializations, which range from the spectacularization of nature in city planning initiatives to the rhetoric of optimism surrounding participatory design, members of the Class of 2013 are also appreciative of the ways in which their separate lines of inquiry sometimes converge in moments of dissonance and harmony, note against note. To further reinforce this idea, each graduating student has invited a respected critic, curator, or practitioner whose research interests intersect with their own, to appear alongside them today on the main stage at the SVA Theatre. A bold move, since there will be no lip-synching going on in this show. While these pairs of emerging and professional design critics are investigating similar territories, their methods and arguments may not necessarily align. Eliciting such points of tension and confluence throughout the day’s proceedings will be our own kapellmeister John Hockenberry, and to set the key will be the design world’s favorite lead soloist Paola Antonelli. We trust you will enjoy the performance. Alice Twemlow Chair SVA MFA Design Criticism
Schedule
12:30 Registration
1:00 Opening Remarks: Alice Twemlow, John Hockenberry 1:15 Keynote Lecture: Paola Antonelli, Nexus of Things 2:00 Andrew Blauvelt, Graphic Design: Discipline, Medium, Practice, Tool, or Other? 2:30 Bryn Smith, What We Talk About When We Talk About Exhibiting Graphic Design
2:45 Fiona Raby, United micro-Kingdoms (UmK): A Design Fiction 3:15 Tiffany Lambert, Expert Citizens, Citizen Experts: Transforming Participation in Product Design
3:30 Coffee Break
3:45 Mark Foster Gage, Architecture After Concepts 4:15 Matt Shaw, Avant-Pop Architecture 1: The New Literalism
4:30 Toni Griffin, Design for the Just City 5:00 Brigette Brown, Overcoming Obstruction: Identifying the Infrastructural Inequities that Perpetuate Segregation in Red Hook 5:15 Coffee Break
5:30 Michael Sorkin, New York City (Steady) State 6:00 Cecilia Fagel, From One to a Million: Lessons from the Spectacle of Nature in New York City 2012
6:15 Panel Discussion: All Speakers 7:00 Closing Remarks
7:30 Reception, Swiss Institute, 18 Wooster Street
Opening Remarks: Alice Twemlow, John Hockenberry
1:00
Alice Twemlow is chair and co-founder of the SVA MFA Design Criticism program. She writes about design for publications including Design Observer, Eye, and The Architect’s Newspaper, and has recently contributed essays to Iconic Designs: 50 Stories about 50 Things (Berg, 2014), Lolita—Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (Print, 2013) and The Aspen Complex (Sternberg Press, 2012). She has directed several design conferences, and frequently moderates and presents at seminars and conferences, most recently at “Blunt: Explicit and Graphic Design Criticism Now,” the 2013 AIGA Design Educators Conference. Twemlow is also a PhD candidate in the RCA/V&A History of Design program in London, where she is researching the history of design criticism in the United States and the United Kingdom since the 1950s.
John Hockenberry, founding host of the public radio program “The Takeaway,” has worked in network television, documentary films, new media, and is the author of the novel River out of Eden as well as the journalist memoir Moving Violations, a National Book Critic’s Circle Award finalist. He has been host or correspondent for a half-dozen network programs, including “All Things Considered,” “Morning Edition,” and “Talk of the Nation” on NPR; “Day One” and “Good Morning America Sunday” at ABC News; and “Edgewise”, “Hockenberry,” and “Dateline NBC” at NBC News. Holder of four Emmy awards and four Peabody awards for journalism, Hockenberry is also a celebrated speaker at the TED conference and, as a high-profile advocate for social justice and the rights of the disabled, he has argued for disability rights at the United Nations and at the White House.
Opening Remarks
Moderator
1:15
Keynote Lecture: Paola Antonelli
Nexus of Things In the past twenty years, design has branched out in new directions that have galvanized young practitioners, sparked business models, and attracted worldwide public attention. A designer today can choose to focus on interactions, interfaces, the web, visualizations, socially-minded infrastructures and products, immersive spaces, bioengineering, sustainability, video games, critical scenarios, and yes, even products and furniture. In the next twenty-five years, I imagine and hope, designers will be at the nexus of things. Like physics, design will be loosely separated between theoretical and applied. Theoretical designers will be exquisite generalists, while applied designers will continue to make objects, but objects will not always be physical; they will often be shared, not owned; they might be starters that people will finish and customize at home using 3D printers and other on-demand services; they will visualize complex infrastructures and systems to make them manageable by scientists, policymakers, and citizens. How might we as writers and curators—as fellow travelers with design—respond to, interpret, and evaluate these shifts in practice over the next quarter-century? And how does looking to the future change how we interact with and approach design today?
Keynote Speaker
Paola Antonelli is senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art where, since 1994, she has curated groundbreaking exhibitions such as “Design and the Elastic Mind,” “Humble Masterpieces,” “Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design,” “SAFE: Design Takes on Risk,” and “Workspheres.” Prior to joining the staff at MoMA, Antonelli was the editor of Abitare and a contributing editor to Domus. Among the books she has written are: Humble Masterpieces: Everyday Marvels of Design and Objects of Design from the Museum of Modern Art. She also writes for publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Harvard Design, Metropolis, and Paper. For these accomplishments she received the 2006 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Design Mind Award, a senior fellowship from the Royal College of Art, London, and an honorary doctorate from Kingston University. Antonelli teaches “Design Exhibition and Collection Curation” at the SVA MFA in Design Criticism.
2:00
Andrew Blauvelt
Graphic Design: Discipline, Medium, Practice, Tool, or Other? In an essay entitled “Towards Critical Autonomy,” written more than a decade ago, I wrestled with the notion of graphic design, as it faced dispersal, atomization, or obliteration by the challenges of a new era, and posed the question: Can graphic design save itself? For this talk, I will revisit this central question again in the context of “Graphic Design: Now in Production,” an exhibition and book produced just over a year ago by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and the Walker Art Center.
Guest Speaker
Andrew Blauvelt is curator of Architecture and Design and chief of communications and audience engagement at the Walker Art Center. Blauvelt has organized several major touring exhibitions for the Walker, including: “Graphic Design: Now in Production” with the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, “Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes” with the Carnegie Museum of Art, and “Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life.” He is currently working on an exhibition that explores the elevated pedestrian walkway in various global “skyway” cities. From 1998–2010, Blauvelt served as design director of the Walker, which was awarded the 2009 National Design Award for Corporate and Institutional Achievement, the first non-profit organization to be recognized in the category. Prior to the Walker, he was head of the Graphic Design department and director of graduate studies at North Carolina State University’s School of Design. Blauvelt writes and lectures about design and culture for various publications including Design Observer.
2:30
Bryn Smith
Bryn Smith is a graphic designer and writer. She studied Journalism and New Media at the University of Colorado, and established her New York-based design practice in 2002. She has since produced award-winning work for a broad clientele, including the Clinton Foundation and Carbone Smolan Agency. In 2012, Bryn worked in the editorial department at Print, writing about popular culture and design; and at Pentagram, helping to coordinate the exhibition “Double Portrait: Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast, Graphic Designers” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is currently developing “In the Wild,” a roving exhibition and monthly publication on noteworthy works of graphic design. In April, Bryn was a panelist at “Blunt: Explicit and Graphic Design Criticism Now,” the annual AIGA Design Educators Conference. smithbryn@gmail.com @likeyoucare
What We Talk About When We Talk About Exhibiting Graphic Design If it’s true that exhibitions are the medium through which most art becomes known,1 the opposite might be said for graphic design. Posters, books, film titles, signs, magazines, and packaging to name only a few, are all encountered regularly in the context of dayto-day life. In contrast, exhibitions on the subject are rare—including 2011’s “Graphic Design: Now in Production” at the Walker Art Center, there have been only three major shows in the United States over the last twenty-five years—but this is changing. Designers, who have often been critical of the ways in which their work is removed from its cultural or commercial context when exhibited in museums and galleries, are now frequently engaging the exhibition space as part of a diverse practice. This presentation examines the tensions that underscore persistent objections to displaying graphic design, and asks whether this shift signals the start of a larger discussion about representation in the field. As new challenges to the white cube are considered, is it time for us—as designers, curators, and critics—to rethink how we approach exhibitions of graphic design? 1 Ressa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, eds. Thinking about Exhibitions (New York: Routledge,1996), 1.
Student Speaker
Here and Now: The Problem With Exhibiting Graphic Design At first it seems that typographer and designer Peter Bil’ak is being overly provocative. “Presenting design in an exhibition space […] is akin to looking at a collection of stuffed birds in order to study how they fly and sing,”1 he writes in the essay “Graphic Design in the White Cube.” Although the jacket of a book or the gridded layout of a magazine doesn’t immediately evoke the flight or melodies of a songbird, the line still resonates. While Bil’ak’s larger argument centers around the cultural, commercial, and historical framework he believes essential to understanding a work of graphic design, it is his choice of metaphor that reveals deeply held beliefs about the practice.2 Wildlife, not to mention death and imprisonment, are often invoked in reviews and commentary around exhibitions of graphic design. “Seeing it in captivity felt wrong,” 3 wrote critic Karrie Jacobs, after viewing the field’s first major exhibition in 1989. “Exotic specimens caught under glass,”4 wrote historian Bridget Wilkins in an article for Eye. Last year, in a review for The Architect’s Newspaper, critic Alice Twemlow categorized the hundreds of objects on display during “Graphic Design: Now in Production” as, “captured like so many vividly patterned butterflies in frames and cases and on monitors and walls.” 5 Language of this kind reinforces the idea that these objects were once living creatures, whose life as measured by freedom from a vitrine or frame is temporarily snuffed out within the confines of a museum. “Most graphic design is created to live in some sort of real-world context. To then take it and put it into a gallery […] it’s not without interest, but this act turns graphic design into anthropological objects taken out of their original context of usage,” 6 says Prem Krishnamurthy, a principal at multidisciplinary
Thesis Extract: Bryn Smith
design studio Project Projects. Here the “real world” is used in contrast to the unnatural environment created by the museum. Art belongs, as it is made purposely for the gallery, but graphic design feels out of place precisely because it is not. Among designers, there is a strong conviction that this is true. Graphic design in the everyday, in use, is where it belongs. “What happens when it shows up in an exhibition, in a gallery? I do think some of the life gets sucked out,” 7 explains Walker Art Center design director Emmet Byrne. For Byrne, and designers like him, the loss of functionality when a piece exits daily life and enters the museum seems personal. And to some extent, it is. Designers are especially sensitive to context. They are by some accounts “professional mediators” 8 whose daily task is to frame and translate content with particular attention to its medium. The gallery upends that careful framing. But it also taps into something much deeper, and more visceral. David Reinfurt, of design-based workshop Dexter Sinister, finds the experience equally confounding, “It can be difficult to see a lot of design work all in one place, because you feel the violation. What’s the context of this thing? How did it really work? It can feel not so good to see these things contained.” 9 Art is often held up as the counterpoint to design in these examples. But according to Krishnamurthy, to assume art simply belongs in the gallery without question, is a reductionist reading of a much more complex system. “Contemporary art has been in a continuous discourse about its context or representation, self-consciously since the 1950s or ‘60s,” he says. “Graphic design has never done that.”10 Works by conceptual artists like Frank Stella, Joseph Kosuth, and William Anastasi were often self-referential, questioning the condition of the wall as well
as their own representation.11 In a widely circulated three-part essay written for Artforum in 1976, artist Brian O’Doherty questioned the “unshadowed, white, clean, artificial” modernist gallery in relation to the art it holds.12 Exploring context as a thing unto itself, O’Doherty also emphasized the lifelessness of the white cube. “Art exists in a kind of eternity of display. There is no time. This eternity gives the gallery a limbolike status; one has to have died already to be there.”13 Perhaps this proximity to death, tangible in the exhibition space, is what gives designers such pause when contemplating their work within it. The museum’s primary function is ideological, but its history is often rooted in the architectural tradition of funereal and religious building types.14 These conflicting elements of devotion and loss, confounded by the separation of work from its social component, trigger deep emotional responses. Surprisingly, designers aren’t abandoning exhibiting practice altogether, but instead are engaging it more frequently both as exhibitors and curators.
1 Peter Bil’ak, “Graphic Design in the White Cube,” 2006, http://www.typotheque.com/articles/ graphic_design_in_the_white_cube. 2 Ibid. 3 Karrie Jacobs, “Prototype: first impressions + second thoughts,” Metropolis, May 1990. 4 Bridget Wilkins, “Why is design history so obsessed by appearance?” Eye no. 6, February 1992. 5 Alice Twemlow, “Review: Taking The Pulse,” The Architect’s Newspaper, July 4, 2012, http://archpaper.com/news/ articles.asp?id=6179. 6 Prem Krishnamurthy, interview by Bryn Smith, December 12, 2012, Project Projects, New York, NY. 7 Emmet Byrne, interview by Bryn Smith, December 21, 2012, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. 8 Project Projects, “Close Encounters,” The Way Beyond Art: Wide White Space, (California: California College of the Arts, 2012), 53. 9 David Reinfurt, interview by Bryn Smith, January 29, 2013, Dexter Sinister, New York, NY. 10 Krishnamurthy, interview. 11 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, The Ideology of the Gallery Space, (California: University of California Press,1999), 29–34. 12 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 15. 13 Ibid. 14 Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Universal Survey Museum,” Art History 3, No. 4 (1980): 449.
Thesis Extract: Bryn Smith
2:45
Fiona Raby
United micro-Kingdoms (UmK): A Design Fiction Design has tended to be solution driven, but the problems are becoming more complex and contradictory, and the solutions no longer so easy to define. The space before us is unresolved, full of dilemmas and trade-offs. Yet, even here, designers are perfectly equipped to flourish. Understanding and accepting the complexity, and the messy loose ends, can provide cohesion through multiple possibilities. Tangible problem-solving design skills can be used to ask questions, interrogate existing frameworks, and generate a broad range of diverse alternatives, both positive and negative. The implications of technological cultures are revealed even as they are still in formation. The requirement is imagination, and more importantly, the ability to trigger the imagination of others. Design proposals are used as participatory tools, not only for a broader public of citizens or end “users” but also for “experts” and “decision makers.” UmK is a design experiment to reignite idealism and social dreaming.
Guest Speaker
Fiona Raby is a partner in the British design partnership Dunne & Raby, established in 1994. She is professor of Industrial Design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and a reader in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London. Dunne & Raby use design as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry, and the public about the social, cultural, and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies. Their work has been exhibited at MoMA, the Pompidou Centre, and the Science Museum in London. They have published two books: Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects and Hertzian Tales. A new book, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming, will be published by MIT Press in late 2013.
3:15
Tiffany Lambert
Tiffany Lambert is a design researcher, writer, and curator. She recently joined the curatorial team at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum where she is involved in planning exhibitions, including the upcoming Triennial. Tiffany is currently working on Milton Glaser’s forthcoming monograph for Taschen, as well as a number of projects for New York-based editorial consultancy Superscript. In 2012, she helped develop the first Designers & Books Fair and continues to serve on the organization’s editorial board. Her writing and research contributions have appeared in Disegno, Metropolis, Domus, and Design Miami’s blog, among others. A recipient of the Henry Wolf Scholarship and Silas H. Rhodes Award, Tiffany holds bachelor degrees in Behavioral Neuroscience and Art & Design from the University of Michigan. tsuelambert@gmail.com @whatseewe urgentobjects.tumblr.com
Student Speaker
Expert Citizens, Citizen Experts: Transforming Participation in Product Design At the very core of design is the user, whose instrumentality only continues to evolve. The recent groundswell of interest in the non-industrial fabrication of objects created by such technologies as 3D printing, shows how users are becoming increasingly involved in the design process. Users are rapidly becoming their own producers of objects. What does it mean when boundaries between design experts and design citizens begin to blur? This presentation provides insights into the way participatory culture operates in relation to product design, and suggests key areas worth deeper, more nuanced consideration. It engages the realm of collaborative design practices—from the various roles the user has assumed, to the resulting reception and dissemination of user-made products—tracking historic precursors to the current impulse of participation for the populace. Critical developments and inherent complexities prompt a reevaluation of the optimistic rhetoric surrounding participation, opening up a space to carry the collective discussion forward.
Participation’s Problematic
Function faltered to cultural possibility in the 1960s at the confluence of political and social upheaval, and with material and technological advances, the course of the user in design began to change. Vehement criticism of commodity aesthetics was directed at the superficial mechanisms of streamlining and styling objects, pinning design as a marketing tool. Fundamental arguments based in the theoretical works of Theodor W. Adorno, Jurgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer, and others sprang up to critique society and the nature of a commodity culture, and proved to be particularly influential on designers. Conceptual projects from the time articulated the growing dissatisfaction with mass production as designers sought an antidote to the “soulless” aesthetics of modernism and passive consumerism. Groups promoting a socially critical agenda began to form all over the world, coinciding with the American counterculture movement. London-based Archigram used technology to design utopias, while in Florence, Superstudio focused more heavily on a social critique of negative utopias, and an “operation to remove all commercially driven clutter from the object.”1 The effort stretched beyond the studio. A 1964–1965 exhibition titled “Architecture Without Architects,” organized at the Museum of Modern Art by Bernard Rudofsky promoted unfamiliar types of architecture, such as African cliff dwellings and Chinese underground villages.2 It was an aesthetic and methodological shift toward an alternate understanding of society—one that prioritized everyday people over the celebrated designer. Paola Antonelli observes, “It’s about what people have done for centuries… forget the signature.” 3 In The Practice of Everyday Life, theorist Michel de Certeau underscores the ways people individualize mass culture through
Thesis Extract: Tiffany Lambert
reappropriation, displacing emphasis from the producer or object onto the consumer.4 He was writing in 1984 but as de Certeau alludes, a condition had emerged in the cultural countercurrents of the 1960s: a crack had surfaced in the modernist vision of a top-down approach. It was clear that the needs and desires of the user had become an increasingly central concern in the organization of daily life. *** “ Collaboration is the answer, but what is the question?”—Hans Ulrich Obrist.5 One of the defining texts on participation lies within the world of art. Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics promotes an art that is concerned with inter-human relations and social contexts rather than private, independent space.6 The text elaborates on participatory practices in the context of the art world and, interestingly, spurred one of the most critical perspectives on participation by New York-based art historian Claire Bishop. Her observation that participatory culture is perhaps more insidious than most let on is particularly important to critical discussions about collaboration between user and designer. These systems of co-creation are still integrally tied to systems of commerce, and may therefore be somewhat less democratic and freeing than the zeitgeist insinuates. The shifting function of the user from a state of passivity to one of engagement does deliver new promises for the social role of design. Most often among them are notions of inclusion, authorship, and decision-making— where the user and practitioner are brought closer to level playing fields. But before marching forth with these ideals, it is imperative to plainly map out some of the problematic
areas that arise when considering participatory practices within design. Issues inherent in participation have been traced in other disciplines, notably art and more recently architecture,7 but not widely published in the field of industrial design. In this thesis, I attempt to illuminate the most salient problems facing the contemporary design industry in relation to participation, in order to establish a critical framework and to expose the potential of a user’s multifaceted engagement with design. The term “participation” itself too frequently goes unquestioned—it seems to suggest that its application is innately for the common good, and tends to be synonymous with terms like “democratic.” 8 Therefore, the first concern is to confront the very words “participation” and “democratic,” which have become catchall descriptors obscuring the more nuanced meanings sheathed behind them. Carole Pateman, a British political theorist and feminist, writing in 1970, gave this impression: It is rather ironical that the idea of participation should have become so popular, for among political theorists and political sociologists the widely accepted theory of democracy (so widely accepted that one might call it the orthodox doctrine) is one in which the concept of participation has only the most minimal role.9 Critics of the rhetoric of participation are few and far between, which may be one significant reason the term “participation” has yet to find an apt, non-generic definition. Regardless, it is the general acceptance of participation as a better way of doing things that is both its strength and weakness. The strength is that it encourages all parties to engage in the creative outcome or product, and knowledge is more readily available.
Thesis Extract: Tiffany Lambert
The weakness is that this engagement can be uncritical and destabilizing, often to the discipline’s own detriment. Despite problems in the oversimplified dialectic of inclusion versus exclusion, topdown versus bottom-up, authorial versus collective, examples from the field begin to highlight moments of hope for participation in design. Can we forego the fashionable rhetoric? Is there an achievable promise for user participation? This thesis offers a sharp challenge to unquestioning advocates of participation, but my hope is that it also provides an awakening to the possibilities of engagement. What is necessary is a different understanding of participation—one that is realistic in acknowledging imbalances, but also more fully articulates what participation means in contemporary product design. 1 Peter Lang and William Menking, Superstudio: Life Without Objects (Milan: Skira, 2003), 25. 2 Curatorial Exhibition Files, Exh. #752. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 3 Paola Antonelli, in discussion with the author, February 14, 2013. 4 Michel de Certeau, The Pratice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 5 Hans Ulrich Obrist, cited in Hal Foster, “Chat Rooms,” in London Review of Books, December 4, 2004, 21–22. 6 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (France: Les Presses Du Reel, 1998). 7 Literature on art and participation is particularly extensive. Some of the key texts are: Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (France: Les Presses Du Reel, 1998); Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012); Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 8 This expanded field currently goes by a variety of names: collaborative design, co-creation, participatory design, et cetera. 9 Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 1.
3:45
Mark Foster Gage
Architecture After Concepts Mark Foster Gage will discuss the theoretical movement in architecture away from abstract conceptualization towards new territories of aesthetics, affects and sensations. His talk will be illustrated with work from his office including projects for Intel, Lady Gaga, Diesel, and others, and will feature material from his two most recent books Aesthetic Theory: Essential Texts for Architecture and Design and Composites, Surfaces and Software: High Performance Architecture.
Guest Speaker
Mark Foster Gage is at the forefront of a new generation of architects working to combine architectural practice with the innovative use of today’s most advanced technologies. The work of his firm, Gage / Clemenceau Architects, ranges from large-scale architectural projects, to a dress for Lady Gaga, and from new store concepts for the fashion company Diesel, to interactive environments for Intel. Gage’s writings have been featured in numerous publications including Log (which he also guest-coedited in Fall 2009), Journal of Architectural Education, A+U, Perspecta, and Architectural Design (AD). Gage also serves as the assistant dean, chair of admissions, and associate professor at the Yale University School of Architecture.
4:15
Matt Shaw
Originally from Columbus, Indiana, Matt Shaw studied Architecture at the University of Cincinnati. After graduating, he returned to Columbus in 2008 to help win Indiana for the Obama campaign. That led to a stint with Rory Reid’s gubernatorial campaign in Reno, Nevada. Matt is the founder and co-editor of Mockitecture, a half-manifesto/half-satire collection of architectural debauchery. He has worked for the Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting (C-Lab), and been published in Beyond, Domus, Icon, and The Architect’s Newspaper. He recently finished writing and researching the guidebook Europe’s Top 100 Architecture and Design Schools for Domus, and helped edit Reiser + Umemoto’s O-14: Projection and Reception for AA Publications. Matt is currently writing various theoretical texts and critical surveys for Domusweb, and helping to move the exhibition “Spontaneous Interventions” from the US Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Biennale, to Chicago, where it will be on view through summer 2013. shawmatthewd@gmail.com @mockitecture mockitecture.com
Student Speaker
Avant-Pop Architecture 1: The New Literalism Throughout architectural history, the figural, or more specifically the recognizable image reference that can be called “the literal,” has been derided as immoral and impure. For this reason, it is often relegated to little more than a footnote in architectural history. Yet many of today’s most interesting experimental architects are using literal, referential forms as part of their architectural work, both built and speculative. This presentation demonstrates how the literal is being used in contemporary practice at many scales. In addition, it examines how this new group of projects and practitioners moves beyond kitsch, attempting to mediate between the recognizable sign and the affective artistic treatment. Through this unique type of architectural poiesis, do the political lines between opposing ideologies begin to break down?
On a Theory of the Processed Image, or Avant-Pop Architecture Avant-Pop architecture has many facets, but this thesis focuses on only one: The New Literalism. In all of the works selected for study, the literal image reference has been processed, or remixed, but not beyond the point of recognition. There is a spectrum on which all art (and architecture) can be placed. At one end of this range is the purely abstract, which is detached of meaning, and on the other is the purely literal, or unprocessed, direct image reference. The extreme abstract end of the spectrum includes paintings by Jackson Pollock or Piet Mondrian, and buildings such as Villa Savoye. Nearly any building by Japanese architecture firm SANAA might also be included here. The purely abstract is often derived from a concept or phenomenon outside of the physical world, such as Pollock’s deep psyche or the chance expressionism of the painterly gesture. It can also be derived from, or “inspired by,” a formal reference, such as Daniel Libeskind’s “Dancing Towers,” in which the movements of Korean dancers were translated into form. This derivative process often obscures the object or image reference beyond the point of recognition, and renders it meaningless. On the other end of the spectrum is the completely literal, which could be considered the opposite of abstract. This is sometimes called figural representation, but in this instance, it specifically denotes a recognizable image reference. The literal can be seen in sculpture, such as Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Hamburger; painting, such as Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe; or architecture, in the form of hot-dog-shaped hotdog stands. These works all take images and represent them literally, with the original object or image reference left intact, recognizable, and legible. There is no level of abstraction in the purely literal, though all have some
Thesis Extract: Matt Shaw
degree of translation (in scale, color, proportion, etc.), because an inherent distinction must be made between “being a specific object,” and “looking like a specific object.” Abstraction and autonomy are generally considered to be characteristics of what is known as “avant-garde.” Removed from an art historical context, the term is defined as: “any creative group active in the innovation and application of new concepts and techniques in a given field (especially in the arts).”1 Such a sensibility is still possible today, and the generic definition will be used here. The “literal” is often associated with pop culture, and also serves as the concept used in “popular” architecture. In the middle of these two extremes lies Avant-Pop. The term Avant-Pop first appeared in 1986, as the title of experimental jazz musician Lester Bowie’s fourth album, and included a series of improvisations on popular tunes like Fats Domino’s classic “Blueberry Hill.” 2 This appropriation and subsequent manipulation of popular culture takes the familiar and makes it unfamiliar, in a calculated, artistic use of the mainstream reference. The recognizable, popular song was remixed into something new, or in other words, an image reference was processed. Art and media theorist Mark Amerika helped to define the Avant-Pop movement in 1994 with his “Avant-Pop Manifesto.” Amerika posits that Avant-Pop artists must not only engage with both the innovative technique and conceptual rigor of their “avant-garde predecessors,” but they also must resist both the “avant-garde sensibility that denies the existence of a popular media culture and its dominant influence over the way we use our imaginations.” He also warned artists against “becoming so enamored by the false consciousness of the Mass Media itself that they lose sight of their creative directives.” 3
In a 2007 Brooklyn Rail article entitled “What is Avant-Pop?” author and assistant professor of English at Yale University Paul Grimstad, agrees with Amerika about the these new artists’ open-minded, non-judgmental attitudes toward the “immediacy of the mainstream hit,” or the “pop hook” as it is termed with reference to music. Avant-Pop artists, Grimstad explained, do not “deform catchiness” as previous avant-garde movements might have done. Rather, Avant-Pop artists restructure and manipulate the song and its components “so that (a) none of the charm of the original tune is lost, but (b) this very accessibility leads one to bump into weirder elements welded into the design.”4 This process does not necessarily prescribe complexity, and in fact some of the best moments of Avant-Pop are bluntly simple. Buildings shaped like everyday objects such as food, or animals, become the architectural equivalent of the popular references that Avant-Pop authors and musicians use in their remixes. New Literalism in architecture communicates simply through literal shapes whose catchiness has not been “deformed.” The new creations however, transcend the merely representational via an added layer of depth and artistic treatment, which holds the viewer’s attention. The relationship between avant-garde and popular culture is well documented, with popular culture often taking the avantgarde and diluting it for a mass audience. Historically, the avant-garde has seen itself in opposition to popular culture. This is not the case in Avant-Pop, where avant-garde technique is applied to popular references and there is a mutual feedback loop, or symbiosis, between the mass media popular culture references and the avant-garde technique. In architecture, the recognizable image references and figural representation of the
Thesis Extract: Matt Shaw
literal architecture of the roadside vernacular, is considered one of the architectures of “popular culture.” The architecture produced when a recognizable image reference from outside of architectural language is manipulated via an avant-garde technique, such as digital modeling or innovative material processes, manages to make these literal shapes look “good,” or like more than an anti-intellectual one-liner made of stucco. Avant-Pop suggests using more sophisticated building systems and techniques in order to make intellectually challenging buildings that also retain legible, literal shapes, and image references across scales. 1 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2009). 2 Alexander Laurence, “Interview with Larry McCaffery,” The Write Stuff, August 1994, http://www.altx.com/larry. mccaffery.html. 3 Mark Amerika, “Avant-Pop Manifesto,” 1994, http://www. altx.com/manifestos/avant.pop.manifesto.html. 4 Paul Grimstad, “What is Avant-Pop?” Brooklyn Rail, September 2007, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/09/ music/what-is-avant-pop.
4:30
Toni Griffin
Design for the Just City Fifty-one years after Jane Jacobs’ seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, our nation is still marked by a portfolio of “legacy cities”—a recently adopted term-ofart developed by the American Assembly at Columbia University to describe the phenomenon of American cities that have been losing population, increasing in unproductive land and retaining a high majority of the region’s poor, unemployed, and under-educated citizens. The depreciation of public sector resources and the urgency of maintaining neighborhood health and safety is compelling the emergence of community organizations, designers, and local residents to act as the new agents of change by introducing innovative practices that require fewer resources and are freed from “top-down” authority. These trends suggest an opportunity for integrating new design innovations into public policy aimed at remediating longstanding structural inequalities and progressing toward a more just and inclusive city.
Guest Speaker
Toni Griffin was recently named professor and director of the J. Max Bond Center for Architecture at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. She also runs the firm Urban Planning and Design for the American City, whose clients include the cities of Newark, NJ, and Detroit, MI. Prior to returning to private practice, Griffin was the director of community development for the City of Newark, where she was responsible for creating a centralized division of planning and urban design, and before that she served as vice president and director of Design for the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation in Washington, DC, and held the position of deputy director for Revitalization Planning and Neighborhood Planning in the DC Office of Planning.
5:00
Brigette Brown
Brigette Brown is a studio artist and critic who comes to New York from Los Angeles—the land of palm trees, sunshine, and bacon-wrapped hot dogs. A native of Southern California, she received her bachelor’s degree in Studio Art and Graphic Design from California State University, Long Beach. Brigette has worked for the Museum of Latin American Art and Surface, researched for Metropolis, and edited a publication for Domus. Brigette enjoys writing about the junction of race, class, and design, and is currently working on a project that investigates the efficacy of social design in the developing world. She will test selected objects—including works from the Cooper-Hewitt’s 2007 exhibition “Design for the Other 90%”—and then document her experiences online. Brigette looks forward to a career as an editor, researcher, or archivist. brigettebrown@yahoo.com @BrigeBrown brigebrown.tumblr.com
Student Speaker
Overcoming Obstruction: Identifying the Infrastructural Inequities that Perpetuate Segregation in Red Hook Red Hook, Brooklyn, is an amalgam of parts that function very differently for each of the two groups that call the neighborhood home: the extremely poor and the well-off. The neighborhood itself is cut off from the rest of the city. And within the neighborhood, separate areas have emerged, which inform the way people shop, commute, eat, and play. This presentation identifies a range of barriers—sometimes visible, sometimes invisible—that prohibit residents’ movement within the neighborhood. They include: the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, insufficient public transportation, limited access to education, and lack of mixed-income housing. Further, the talk examines the way design has contributed to the inequitable separation of people from one another, both historically and currently, and argues for change. As tactics used to segregate have become less overt, the language we use to address the problem must also adjust.
The Commute: Public Transportation and the Highways Moses Built The level of isolation experienced by the poor people in the community of Red Hook, Brooklyn, very clearly determines their social relationship to the rest of the city, and inhibits their upward mobility. Red Hook Houses is New York City’s second largest housing project (just behind Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City, Queens). The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which completely encircles Red Hook Houses, allowed urban planner and New York’s “master builder,” Robert Moses to create a pocket of poor people in Red Hook in the late 1930s. The poor were already working on the waterfront, so by creating housing projects, he more or less guaranteed that the poor people would stay there.1 Ever since, the residents in the projects have been forced to look up at the people driving though their neighborhood, while the drivers effectively look down on the projects as they pass through. This underprivileged area has remained the same for the last seventy-five years, in part because of the limited public transportation. Better access to transportation, the introduction of mixed-income housing, schools, and stores, and more diversity in architecture would help Red Hook residents’ quality of life. “Every few years, someone proposes a light rail or some sort of metro link to the Smith Street station—or lower Manhattan. That addition really would make things easier in Red Hook,” says local business owner Mike Spriggs. He adds that there is the possibility of an above-ground link to public transportation, as a subway tunnel in Red Hook isn’t feasible. The earth beneath the cobblestones and the pavement on the outer edges of the neighborhood is porous and gritty—not really ground at all. This aboveground shuttle would shorten the commute time into Manhattan.
Thesis Extract: Brigette Brown
Along the water’s edge, cobblestone streets, charming buildings, boutique shops, and restaurants give visual cues to residents and visitors alike. These cues state who belongs on what side of Richards Street, the de facto dividing line: the artists, musicians, craftsmen, and upper-middle class condo-dwellers (the new) on one side, and the projects’ residents and working class (the old) on the other. This is not to say the street is impenetrable. Vehicles and pedestrians are free to move (as much as they are willing and able) within the neighborhood. Residents from the Houses must cross over to the proverbial “other side of the tracks” to participate in the culture and diversity happening on the waterfront. The shipping industry isn’t thriving like it once was, especially after IKEA paved over the city’s largest graving dock in 2005, but it is still a large part of Red Hook’s identity. The waterfront remains alive and active with specialty stores, local businesses, IKEA, Fairway, and the burgeoning artist community; Still, it has not been as efficiently utilized for transportation or mixed-use activities, as community members hope it could be. Providing the neighborhood with mixed-use development at the water’s edge could help to integrate Red Hook’s two communities through leisure activities, shopping, food, and culture. Within the last five years, Red Hook has welcomed its newest form of public transportation: the IKEA ferry. The ferry, part of the New York Water Taxi system, runs between lower Manhattan’s Pier 11 and Red Hook for a faster and more efficient commute to New York City’s only IKEA store. Customers have the benefit of a smooth trip to the neighborhood because they don’t have to deal with the lack of public transit, but need only hop on a ten-minute water taxi to transport them from Manhattan to Red Hook. The ferry is free
to IKEA customers who spend ten dollars or more,2 and could be an extremely beneficial asset in cutting the commute time for Red Hook residents who work in Manhattan. But because the trip is five dollars each way for non-customers, it is cost-prohibitive to those without disposable income. I believe the price was set high to intentionally dissuade Red Hook residents from using the ferry for their daily commutes.3 The ferry could have opened up the neighborhood, and made Manhattan more accessible. Instead, getting in and out of the neighborhood is still a problem for Red Hook residents. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has made minimal effort to open up the neighborhood by increasing its access to public transit. Design and political intention are clearly at fault. Oddly, this same isolation is what draws many of the newer residents to the neighborhood. The quiet and solitude is a desirable quality for those looking to escape the noise and the speed of life in Manhattan.4 While the separation of people from public transportation is a negative for poor families who need to go elsewhere for school and work, it’s a luxury for the middleand working-class residents who can afford to live elsewhere but enjoy the peace and quiet of Red Hook. A respite for some is a burden for others. Again, a line is drawn between classes within the community. The physical barriers keeping people in are also the psychological barriers that obstruct movement upward.
Thesis Extract: Brigette Brown
1 Johnathan Mahler, “How the Coastline Became a Place to Put the Poor,” The New York Times, December 3, 2012. 2 Water Taxi: IKEA Express Shuttle, http://www.nywatertaxi. com/tours/ikea (accessed 5 Dec. 2012). 3 Robert, “Free IKEA Water Taxi Rides (for Non-Customers) Are Sunk,” Curbed, July 16, 2008. 4 This is the overall consensus I got from the residents and long-time commuters I interviewed: Mike Spriggs, Kate Farrell, David Trimble, and Frances Medina, as well as the various quick conversations with other people on the ground.
5:30
Michael Sorkin
New York City (Steady) State New York City (Steady) State is an outgoing research project—being undertaken by the non-profit Terreform—to investigate the limits of local autonomy. It is based on the predicate that New York might become completely self-sufficient in key areas of respiration, including food, water, air, waste, manufacture, movement, and building. Underway for over five years, the first major portion of the study—an investigation of urban food production—has now been completed and will be at the core of the talk. Although the project does look at the marginal possibility of a completely autarkic arrangement, its main goal is to compile a lucid encyclopedia of the morphologies and technologies that might allow cities to take far greater responsibility for their effects on the planet.
Guest Speaker
Michael Sorkin is an architect and urbanist whose practice spans design, criticism, and teaching. He is a contributing editor at Architectural Record and the author of numerous books including Variations on A Theme Park, Exquisite Corpse, Local Code, Wiggle, Some Assembly Required, Other Plans, The Next Jerusalem, and After The World Trade Center (edited with Sharon Zukin), among others. Sorkin is the principal of the Michael Sorkin Studio in New York City, a design practice with a special interest in the city and in green architecture. In 2006, Sorkin founded Terreform, a non-profit devoted to research and intervention in urban planning and sustainability issues. Sorkin has been the director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College of New York since 2000.
6:00
Cecilia Fagel
With degrees in architecture and design management, Cecilia Fagel is used to weaving between the worlds of design and business. Prior to D-Crit, Cecilia worked in the furniture design business in Cebu, Philippines, and as a media marketing analyst for a New York-based advisor to Dentsu Japan. Concurrent with her studies, she has developed concepts and external research for a university consortium in Asia. Cecilia applies critique as a tool in design, but sees criticism’s transformative and positive value through literature. (Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is one of her literary guides.) She is currently working on a book about the visual culture surrounding urban beehives, and is adapting her thesis into an illustrated storybook for children. Cecilia looks forward to research and design projects that fuse her passion for criticism and literature. Her writing has been published in The Architect’s Newspaper, form, and by the CooperHewitt’s DesignFile. mcfagel@gmail.com @ccfagel mcfagel.tumblr.com
Student Speaker
From One to a Million: Lessons from the Spectacle of Nature in New York City 2012 As city-living is often considered a solution to sprawl and related environmental concerns worldwide, some ambitious NYC urban initiatives—such as Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030 for parks and public spaces (2007) and The Design Trust for Public Space’s High Performance Landscape Guidelines (2010)—are being replicated in cities around the world. Yet this blanketing of urban greenery often screens the more subtle social, economic, and philosophical implications of designing nature in the city. This presentation takes a pedestrian approach, studying the winding parkland fronting each doorstep, and inspecting nature in the public sidewalk. Using the Million TreesNYC initiative as a contemporary cue, we start with the story of one tree and expand our lens to the image of a future of a million trees. Will this spectacle become a specter? Is it all arboreal ether? We take a critical pause to see the reflection—how we frame and evaluate—through the mirror that is nature.
Moments from A Contemporary Archeology of Nature in New York City It is easy to segue to the eternal riddles of “What is nature? What is a city?” But that is not the point of this study. Using Michel Foucault’s definition of the archeology of knowledge, it tackles the contemporary image of nature—not to create a worldview, but rather, a way of seeing. Knowledge, as defined by Foucault, is not only found in demonstration, but also in fiction, reflection, narrative accounts, institutional regulations, and political decisions. *** Mitchell Joachim, one of the leading architects and thinkers in environmental and sustainable design, emphatically said in an interview that he does not use the term “nature,” claiming that “The term ‘nature’ is a seventeenth-century construct that is way outmoded philosophically.” He prefers the term “socio-ecological”, explaining that it is more appropriate because “it includes the human agenda and the drama of the human will that would influence how we think about ecology.”1 Joachim’s thoughts reflect how today’s discourse about nature has anthropocentric leanings where “man is being reconsidered as the most significant entity of the universe.” 2 But is there something that we miss when we discard the nuanced history of the word “nature.” In doing so, perhaps we are forgetting our own history—that of how nature and man are intertwined. I see a warning sign from twenty years ago, reading the environmental historian William Cronon’s introduction to the book Uncommon Ground, where he states “Nature becomes our dogma, the wall we build around our own vision to protect it from competing views. And like all dogmas, it is the death of dialogue and self-criticism. This is its seductive power.
Thesis Extract: Cecilia Fagel
This is the trap it has set for us.” 3 Indeed, it is hard to argue against nature. Matthew Gandy, a scholar in geography and urban studies at the University College of London, studied nature in New York City through the lens of urban infrastructure. Gandy is influenced by Cronon’s views but gives pragmatic advise in that “it is because of the innate ambiguity of nature and its ability to provide ideological veneer to almost any argument that we need to critically examine how changing meanings of nature have intersected with wider debates about urban change.” 4 It is in this Moebius-like twist, in this changing meaning of nature, that we can begin to critique. *** Janette Sadik-Khan, commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation said during a public dialogue, “I was in Mexico and they’re copying the playbook from New York. You’re seeing cities competing effectively in terms of upping the game on sustainability and quality of life. They’re not doing it because they’re green or good on the environment. They’re doing it because it’s an economic and development strategy.” 5 Dare we ask what happens during an economic downturn? Or unspeakably worse, when we do not deeply think of nature beyond just a development strategy? Will it be 1922 again when nature of the roaring 1920s (a period of economic prosperity) was described in dismal terms: “the few trees that survived on Manhattan’s streets appeared to be shackled escapees from Central Park.” 6 *** Imagine seeing a tree trunk and branches seemingly bursting through a circular frame
of a naturally stained bentwood chair. The creator of this vision was student artist, Kelsi Anderson, who installed her sculpture on an empty tree pit along Second Avenue on 8th street. She called it Street-Tree-Chair, and it was her way to express how she felt about the Million TreesNYC project. She was critical of the way the project objectified trees. She had spent a day following a NYC Parks forester around Staten Island who was tasked to find sites to plant trees. “They were told to plant as many trees as possible in order to hit that number,” 7 Anderson recalled. It was a temporary spectacle, however, disappearing in two weeks. Art critic Hal Foster defines the spectacle in contemporary art as operating “via our fascination with the hyperreal, with ‘perfect’ images that make us whole at the price of delusion, of submission. We become locked in its logic because spectacle both affects the loss of the real and provides us with the fetishistic images necessary to deny or assuage this loss.” 8 Breaking down Foster’s definition, he first contrasts spectacle to representation. I posit that Street-Tree-Chair is more spectacle than representation. A representation is based on reality, for example, the logo of New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation is symbolized by a leaf. In contrast, Street-Tree-Chair functions as a hyperreal version of two things, a real tree and the act of tree planting. As Foster explains, the resulting “fetishistic image” is so strong that it negates what is real—in this case, that Street-Tree-Chair is just a bunch of sticks and branches. In other words, we are used to—no, we demand—that our street trees conform to the image we already have of them; that they live for our pure aesthetic pleasure. The imagined image can be so overpowering
Thesis Extract: Cecilia Fagel
that we do not see what is really in front of us. Street-Tree-Chair is also an important critical artwork because it forces us confront and question an integral part of nature. As Anderson states on her website, “In nature, death and decay are natural occurrences where the afterlife of an object goes back into the ground to nurture new life.” 9 The image of nature in the city is devoid of the most integral aspect of nature: death. We often deny nature its right to die, regenerate, and nurture new life. 1 Mitchell Joachim. Interview by author. Phone interview. New York, July 3, 2012. 2 Dictionary and Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster Online. 3 William Cronon. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996), 52 4 Matthew Gandy. Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 13. 5 Janette Sadik-Khan. “Public Spaces, Public Good: Building the Livable City,” Lecture, Urban Dialogue Series from Fordham University, New York City, October 10, 2012. 6 Max Page. The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900– 1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 194. 7 Kelsi Anderson. Interview by author. Phone interview. New York City, January 27, 2013. 8 Hal Foster. Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1985), 83. 9 Kelsi Anderson. “StreetTreeChair—Kelsi M Anderson.” Kelsi Anderson, n.d. http://www.kelsianderson.com/ streettreechair.html, January 7, 2013.
Acknowledgements Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the success of the D-Crit program during its first five years, and to those who have helped to stage this conference. Emily Weiner, Program Coordinator Victor de la Cruz, Systems Administrator Steven Heller, D-Crit Program Co-founder David Rhodes, SVA President Anthony Rhodes, Executive Vice-President Jeff Nesin, Provost Andrea Codrington Lippke, D-Crit Thesis Advisor Peter Hall, External Reader Stephen Nickson, Presentation Skills Coach Thesis Advisors: Daniel D’Oca Rick Poynor Guest Critics: Charles Adler Khoi Vinh Alan Rapp Meredith TenHoor Design: Matthew Rezac, Conference Identity and Design Eric Price, Web Design Modern Press, Printing Michael George, Event Photography Stuart Solomon, Videography Vincent Burich, Technical Assistant Tony Chu, Tweet Cloud Development, @tonyhschu
D-Crit Faculty: Kurt Andersen Paola Antonelli Akiko Busch John Cantwell Chappell Ellison Russell Flinchum Steven Heller Karrie Jacobs Alexandra Lange Adam Harrison Levy Andrea Codrington Lippke Leital Molad Ginger Nolan Phil Patton Robin Pogrebin Elizabeth Spiers Karen Stein First Year D-Crit Students: Nawar Al-Kazemi Lynda Decker Caterina Francisca Sandra Nuut Anne Quito Katherine Roberts Anna Marie Smith SVA Theatre: Vidya Alexander, House Manager Vincent Burich, Technical Director Jessica Jackson, Administrative Manager Adam Natale, Director
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The SVA MFA in Design Criticism is devoted to the study of design, architecture, and urban infrastructure. The innovative two-year graduate program trains students to interrogate and evaluate design and its social and environmental implications, and to experiment with ways to engage design criticism’s publics. Working alongside New York’s best-respected editors, authors, critics, curators, and historians, D-Crit students learn how to build an argument, develop a critical stance, and hone a writerly voice. Instructed by such faculty members as MoMA’s senior curator of Design and Architecture Paola Antonelli, urban design critic Karrie Jacobs, and online media maven Elizabeth Spiers, students communicate their unique perspectives through a range of media, including radio podcasts, exhibitions, video essays, events, syllabi, online media, and books. The SVA MFA Design Criticism program seeks to cultivate design criticism as a discipline and contribute to design discourse with new writing and thinking that challenges and inspires. Applicants come to the program with experience in design, architecture, journalism, and from academic backgrounds in art history, English literature, philosophy, and critical studies; alumni of the program go on to work as editors, writers, curators, researchers, bloggers, managers, entrepreneurs, and educators. D-Crit is accepting applications for Fall 2013 on a rolling basis, as space allows, and significant scholarships are available. For more information please visit dcrit.sva.edu.
School of Visual Arts has been a leader in the education of artists, designers, and creative professionals for more than six decades. With a faculty of distinguished working professionals, dynamic curriculum, and an emphasis on critical thinking, SVA is a catalyst for innovation and social responsibility. Comprised of more than 6,000 students at its Manhattan campus and 35,000 alumni in 100 countries, SVA also represents one of the most influential artistic communities in the world. For information about the College’s 31 undergraduate and graduate degree programs, visit sva.edu.
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