Filter Island, positioned between the Chicago River and Lake Michigan, Chicago

UrbanLab will present their new Graham funded book, Bowling: Water, Architecture, Urbanism, which investigates the symbiotic relationships between architectures of quality and infrastructures of quantity in Chicago, New York, and the Sun Belt. The book is a conjecture of what a comprehensible city could be to combat (real and predicted) natural crises—through design-based analysis and experimentation.

UrbanLab is an architecture and urban design office cofounded by Sarah Dunn and Martin Felsen. The practice blends design and research to produce uniquely progressive, site-specific projects, resulting in a new aesthetic for environmentally resilient architecture, landscapes, and public space. The office’s realized projects range in scale from small houses to urban districts.

Sarah Dunn received her BA from Columbia College and her MArch from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. Dunn is a partner in the architecture and urban design firm UrbanLab in Chicago. UrbanLab won the AIA College of Fellows Latrobe Prize (2009), was selected as an Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of New York (2010), and exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2012) and the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2015). Dunn is also an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Martin Felsen received his BArch from Virginia Tech and his MS from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. Felsen is a licensed architect and a partner in the architecture and urban design firm UrbanLab in Chicago. Felsen is an associate professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, College of Architecture. Felsen serves on the Board of Places Journal Foundation, the Board of Archeworks, and the Editorial Advisory Board of The Architect's Newspaper.

Related Graham Foundation supported project:
2014 Publication Grant to Sarah Dunn & Martin Felsen Bowling: Water, Architecture, Urbanism

Habitat Puerto Rico, model showing terraces and view from walkway system, 1968. Courtesy Safdie Architects

Capacity is limited; the event will also be live streamed here.

Please note that seating for this event is on a first-come, first-served basis. Registration is required but does not guarantee entry. Doors open 30 minutes prior to the lecture for those registered in advance. Reservations expire 5 minutes before the start time, at which point seating will be released to the waitlist. Overflow viewing areas will be available on the first and second floors of the building.

The Graham Foundation is pleased to present a talk by Moshe Safdie in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the architect’s design for Habitat ’67 in Montreal. Completed early in his career, this project initiated a series of Habitat housing developments in New York, Israel, San Juan, and Singapore, among other cities that strove to foster new forms of community—bringing together nature, culture, and privacy within the city. Safdie discusses the unique challenges of the Habitat projects, as well as how these ideas have continued to inform and shape his contemporary practice.

This talk coordinates with the Graham’s presentation of David Hartt’s exhibition in the forest, a meditative installation and film, which investigates Safdie’s unfinished Habitat Puerto Rico as it stands today.

Moshe Safdie is an architect, urban planner, educator, theorist, and author. Over a celebrated 50-year career, Safdie has explored the essential principles of socially responsible design with a distinct visual language. A citizen of Israel, Canada, and the United States, Moshe Safdie graduated from McGill University. After apprenticing with architect Louis Kahn in Philadelphia, Safdie returned to Montréal, established his own firm in 1964, and realized Habitat ’67—a key component of the master plan for the 1967 World Exhibition. The innovative residential complex Habitat ’67, an adaptation of Safdie's undergraduate thesis, marked a turning point in modern architecture. Author of four books and a frequent essayist and lecturer, Safdie’s global practice includes work in North and South America, the Middle East, and throughout Asia and Australia. Projects span a wide range of typologies, including airports, museums, performing arts, libraries, housing, mixed use, and entire cities. His honors include the Companion of the Order of Canada; the Gold Medal from both the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and the American Institute of Architects; la Medaille du Merite from the Order of Architects of Quebec, Canada; and Israel’s Rechter Prize. The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum awarded Mr. Safdie the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2016.

The first floor of the Madlener House is accessible via an outdoor lift. Talks are held in the ballroom on the third floor, which is only accessible by stairs. Please call 312.787.4071 to make arrangements.

To learn about additional ways to help, Americans for the Arts has organized a list of trusted organizations on their website, which can be accessed here.

For more information on the exhibition, in the forest, click here.

David Hartt, still from “in the forest,” 2017. 4K Digital Video File, color, sound; 20 min. Courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey and commissioned by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Join the Graham Foundation for an artist talk and reception with David Hartt in conjunction with his current exhibition, in the forest, which revisits architect Moshe Safdie’s unfinished 1968 Habitat Puerto Rico project through a contemporary lens. The exhibition continues Hartt’s investigation into the relationship between ideology, architecture, and the environment. in the forest is on view at the Foundation from September 14, 2017–January 6, 2018.

David Hartt (b. 1967, Montréal) lives and works in Philadelphia where he is Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at The Art Institute of Chicago; LA><ART, Los Angeles; and Or Gallery, Vancouver. Additionally, his work has been included in several group exhibitions including Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 at The Museum of Modern Art, America Is Hard to See at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Shine a light/Surgir de l’ombre: Canadian Biennial at the National Gallery of Canada. His work is in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Hartt is the recipient of a 2015 Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant. In 2012 he was named a United States Artists Cruz Fellow and in 2011 he received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. Hartt is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago; David Nolan Gallery, New York; and Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin.

To learn about additional ways to help, Americans for the Arts has organized a list of trusted organizations on their website, which can be accessed here.

For more information on the exhibition, in the forest, click here.

Artist, writer, theorist, and composer Yasunao Tone presents new work embracing artificial intelligence (AI).

Tone has collaborated with Professor Tony Myatt, University of Surrey, UK, and a team of researchers including Mark Fell and Dr. Paul Modler, with the support of the Issue Project Room. A series of performances using Tone’s MP3 Deviation software were captured in a laboratory then used to train Kohoen Neural Networks to develop artificial intelligences (AIs) that can simulate several of his performance approaches. The AIs are integrated in a software framework and computer performance system that extracts attributes from the audio they generate to “listen” to the output and make performance actions as if they were virtual Tone performers. Five versions of Tone AI exist in the performance software, each of which exhibits certain responses modeled on those previously adopted by Tone.

For Lampo, Tone performs AI Deviation V1#7 and AI Deviation V2#2.

In concert Tone deviates and controls AI versions of himself along with the mechanisms that each AI uses to hear and respond to the audio they generate—corrupting the technologies designed to simulate his own performances, and interacting live with AI versions of himself as performer.

Yasunao Tone (b.1935, Tokyo, Japan) has been active in creating event works and experimental music since the 1960s and has been an organizer and participant in Fluxus, Group Ongaku, Hi-Red Center, and Team Random (Japan’s first computer art group). His work typically employs random events and indeterminate compositional techniques. Tone coined the term “paramedia art” to describe his work, and his artistic inventions include prepared CD and interventions with an MP3 system. Primarily a composer, Tone has worked in many media, creating pieces for electronics, computer systems, film, radio, and television, as well as environmental art. His work is distinguished by conversion of text into music via images with analog and digital means, and with a critique of the medium in use. Tone has presented concerts at The Kitchen, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum, all in New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona; the Ars Electronica Festival, Linz; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Sonic Lights, Amsterdam; and ATP festivals and Lovebytes festivals, UK, among many others. Honors include the Ars Electronica Golden Nica prize and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts award in music.

Yasunao Tone presented his Paramedia Mix and Wounded Kanji Dictionary at Lampo in April 2007. He also performed in the Lampo series in November 2002, joined by Florian Hecker in the duo’s first US concert.

Since 2010 the Graham Foundation has supported and partnered with Lampo to produce this performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a non-profit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

NASA Visible Earth, Great Lakes, 1999. Courtesy SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and ORBIMAGE.

Join the Graham Foundation for a panel discussion and reception to celebrate the launch of Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan. This recent grantee publication describes the conditions for urbanization across the Great Lakes region and assembles a multi-layered, empirical description of urbanization processes within the drainage basins of the five Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River. This publication encompasses a range of representational forms including maps, plans, diagrams, timelines, and photographs, as well as speculative design research projects and critical texts. Postponing diagnosis, let alone treatment of these conditions, Third Coast Atlas aspires to simply describe. It proposes a new geographic gestalt for urban analysis. Superimposed upon the North American continent, and with easily recognizable yet divergent political and geological borders, this megaregion traverses portions of eight US states and two Canadian provinces, as well as the world’s largest collection of surficial fresh water. Third Coast Atlas characterizes the littoral edge as a distinct field of urbanization, and constructs a reading of the region both specific and speculative.

Daniel Ibañez is a practicing architect and urbanist, and founder and co-director of the design firm Margen-Lab. He is currently an instructor and doctor of design candidate at the Harvard GSD, editor of New Geographies, and researcher at the Urban Theory Lab. Ibañez’s research critically seeks to frame the design disciplines in relation to broader socio-ecological interdependencies through cross disciplinary research on the field of urban metabolism. Daniel is editor several book publications, including New Geographies, no. 6: Grounding Metabolism (HUP, 2014) and the Wood Urbanism: From Molecular to Territorial (forthcoming Actar, 2017). Also, since 2015, Daniel is editor at urbanNext.

Clare Lyster is an Irish architect, educator, and writer based in Chicago, Illinois, where she is associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture. She is principal of CLUAA, a research-based design office in Chicago operating at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and planning. In addition to her design practice, Lyster writes about architecture and urbanism from the perspective of contemporary theories in landscape, infrastructure, and globalization. She is author of Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Cities (Birkhauser, 2016); co-editor of 306090_09, Regarding Public Space (PA Press, 2005); and Envisioning the Bloomingdale, (Chicago Architecture Club,2009). She is the 2017 Gillmor Lecturer at the University of Calgary.

Charles Waldheim is a Canadian-American architect and urbanist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Waldheim’s research examines the relationships between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. He is author, editor, and co-editor of numerous books on these subjects, and his writing has been published and translated internationally. Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he directs the school’s Office for Urbanization. Waldheim is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Study Centre of the Canadian Centre for Architecture; and the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan.

Mason White is a Canadian-American architect and urbanist based in Toronto, Ontario. White is founding partner of Lateral Office, a Toronto-based experimental design practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. In addition to his practice, White is associate professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. He is recipient of the Emerging Voices and Young Architects Prize from the Architectural League of New York; the Wheelwright Fellowship from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design; the Friedman Visiting Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley; and the Lefevre Fellowship at The Ohio State University. White is co-editor of Bracket, vol. 1 and co-editor of Pamphlet Architecture, no. 30: Coupling—Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism.

Philip Enquist is Partner in Charge of Urban Design and Planning SOM and the leader of its Global City Design Practice. The scale of Enquist’s design perspective encompasses from innovating sustainable urban forms that enhance city living with walkable, transit-enabled districts humanized by their natural amenities to rapidly changing urban clusters within regional ecosystems like North America’s Great Lakes basin and China’s Bohai Rim. He has taught at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and as the Charles Moore Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He was honored with the 2010 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Architectural Guild of the University of Southern California's School of Architecture for his dedication to strengthening the physical, social, and intellectual infrastructure of cities and in 2009 Chicago Tribune named him and his studio as one of the "Chicagoans of the Year in Architecture."

Martin Felsen co-founded UrbanLab in 2000 and is an Associate Professor in the Illinois Institute of Technology’s (IIT) College of Architecture. Martin received the Dubin Family Young Architect Award in 2007 from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Chicago. Also in 2007 UrbanLab was named as the national winner of the History Channel’s “City of the Future” competition for a proposal titled “Growing Water.” UrbanLab won the American Institute of Architects (AIA) College of Fellows Latrobe Prize in 2009, and UrbanLab’s architecture and urban design projects have won several design awards from the AIA. In 2010 UrbanLab was included in the Emerging Voices lecture series sponsored by the Architectural League. In 2012, UrbanLab exhibited work at the Venice Biennale in "Common Ground" curated by David Chipperfield, and in 2015, UrbanLab exhibited "Filter Island" at the Chicago Biennial. Publications presenting UrbanLab’s design and research work include Architecture, Architectural Record, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. He is co-author, with Sarah Dunn of the book, Bowling: Water, Architecture, Urbanism, which investigates the symbiotic relationships between architectures of quality and infrastructures of quantity in Chicago, New York, and the Sun Belt.

James Wasley is a Director of the Institute for Ecological Design and the former Chair of the Department of Architecture at UWM. Professor Wasley’s current research is in the creation of ecological urban waterscapes at a variety of scales. Since 2011 he has led the school-wide Milwaukee Inner Harbor Project, which has explored the redevelopment and ecological restoration of the 200+ acres of brownfields surrounding the Port of Milwaukee. This has in turn led to a suite of ten demonstration projects on the harbor at the UWM School of Freshwater Sciences that are moving towards implementation. Professor Wasley teaches architectural design studios and professional practice seminars from an ecological perspective.

Related Graham Foundation supported projects:

2015 Publication Grant to Daniel Ibañez, Clare Lyster, Charles Waldheim, and Mason White for Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan of The Great Lakes Region

2014 Publication Grant to Clare Lyster for Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Our Cities

2014 Publication Grant to Lola Sheppard and Mason White for Many Norths: Spatial Practices in a Polar Territory

2014 Publication Grant to InfraNet Lab (Neeraj Bhatia and Mason White) for Bracket 4 [Takes Action]

2014 Publication Grant to Harvard Graduate School of Design for New Geographies 07: Information Geographies and New Geographies 08: Islands

2013 Exhibition Grant to Harvard Graduate School of Design for Airport Landscape: Urban Ecologies in the Aerial Age (Sonja Dümpelmann and Charles Waldheim, curators)

2001 Grant to the University of Illinois at Chicago for Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives (Katerina Rüedi Ray and Charles Waldheim, authors)

1999 Grant to Georgia Daskalis, Charles Waldheim, and Jason Young for Stalking Detroit

PREVIOUS POSTS NEW POSTS