With Mitchell Joachim, Janette Kim, Lola Sheppard, and Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss
The condition of extremes suggests a tipping point; a moment in which a system shifts from one state to another, often unpredictable state.
Ulrick Beck, in Risk Society, argues that, "being at risk is the way of being and ruling in the world of modernity," and that "global risk is the human condition at the beginning of the twenty-first century." Until now, the developed world has largely been able to successfully displace the economic, environmental, and political impact of its development to other nations and peoples, or other groups and stakeholders within their own nations, rendering the risk invisible.
However with the financial crisis of 2008, and the increasingly tangible impacts of climate change, complete displacement of risk is no longer possible. For one group or region to achieve seeming stability, another will likely lose it, given the voracious nature of capitalism and its environmental costs. Key to understanding the implications of extreme systems is their relationship to risk: the further we move away from a state of equilibrium, the more volatile situations become, the more exposed we are to danger and loss, and the more risk we take on.
Manifesto Series: At Extremes discusses how architecture, infrastructure, and technology negotiate limits and operate in conditions of imbalance.
Do the risk/reward models familiar on the trading floors of global financial markets and real estate speculation projects hold up in design disciplines? If we think of risk and extremes as entangled conditions, How can risk and extreme circumstances be leveraged as a new, productive model for architecture; a model emphasizing speculation as a way to test scenarios, outcomes, and tools? What is the role of design in such contexts? To document? to redress? to mitigate? to capitalize on new opportunities? Does the progressive destabilization of political, social and environmental conditions render design more relevant or less?
Participants will draw from Bracket Vol 3. At Extremes, edited by Lola Sheppard and Maya Przybylski, to present a manifesto for or against how risk and extreme circumstances could become a tool for productive models in architecture.
About the Book:
Bracket is an almanac that highlights emerging critical issues at the juncture of architecture, environment, and digital culture. The series looks at thematics in our age of globalization that are shaping the built environment in unexpected yet radically significant ways.
About the Manifesto Series:
Each iteration of Storefront's Manifesto Series invites participants to denounce a present or past condition, proclaim an alternative present, past or future situation, and indicate a strategy or method of action.
About the Participants
Mitchell Joachim
Co-Founder, Terreform ONE and Associate Professor of Practice, NYU. Formerly, an architect at Frank Gehry and I.M. Pei. Selected by Wired magazine for "The Smart List" and Rolling Stone for "The 100 People Who Are Changing America". His honors include; ARCHITECT R+D Award, Fulbright Scholarship, TED Fellowship, Moshe Safdie Fellow, AIA NY Urban Design Merit Award, 1st Place International Architecture Award, Victor Papanek Social Design Award, Zumtobel Group Award, History Channel Award, and Time magazine's Best Invention with MIT Smart Cities. Co-authored books, "XXL – XS: New Directions in Ecological Design," "Super Cells: Building with Biology," and "Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned". PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MAUD Harvard University, MArch Columbia University.
Janette Kim
Janette Kim is an architectural designer, researcher, and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work focuses on design and ecology in relationship to public representation, interest, and debate. Janette is assistant professor of architecture and co-director of the Urban Works Agency at California College of the Arts, founding principal of the design practice All of the Above, and founding editor of ARPA Journal, a digital publication on applied research practices in architecture. Janette was also Assistant Professor at Syracuse University from 2015-2016 and Adjunct Assistant Professor from 2005-2015 at Columbia University, where she directed the Applied Research Practices in Architecture initiative and the Urban Landscape Lab.
Lola Sheppard / Lateral Office
Lola Sheppard is co-founder, together with Mason White, of Lateral Office, a design practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. The studio describes its process as a commitment to design as a research vehicle to pose and respond to complex, urgent questions in the built environment, engaging in the wider context and climate of a project– social, ecological, or political. Lateral Office have been pursuing research and design work on the role of architecture in remote regions, particularly the North, for the past seven years.
Lateral's work has been exhibited and lectured extensively across the USA, Canada and Europe. Lateral Office are the authors of the upcoming book Many Norths: Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory (Actar 2017) and of Pamphlet Architecture 30, COUPLING: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, published by Princeton Architectural Press (2011). Sheppard and White are also co-editors of the journal Bracket, together with Neeraj Bhatia and Maya Przybylski.
Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss
Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss is a research architect producing exhibitions, books, lectures, installations and buildings. He founded NAO for design and co-founded SMS (School of Missing Studies) for urban studies. He researched for Herzog & de Meuron, designed for Richard Gluckman as well as collaborated with Jenny Holzer, Robert Wilson and Marjetica Potrc. He was a swimmer competing within the national junior league of Yugoslavia.
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