"National Home Advertisement," Life Magazine 37, 11 (September 13, 1954): 139.

Architectural historian Dianne Harris discusses her Graham-funded book Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Examining textual and visual representations of ordinary postwar houses in the United States, Harris uncovers the production of an extraordinarily powerful iconographic and cultural field that repeatedly equated ordinary single-family houses with middle-class and white identities to the exclusion of others, creating an invidious cultural iconography that continues to resonate today.

Please join us for a reception and book signing in the Madlener House library following the talk.

Dianne Harris is director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) and professor of landscape architecture, architecture, art history, and history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She holds a PhD in architectural history from the University of California, Berkeley.  Her scholarship, which has a broad temporal and geographic reach spanning from 18^th-century Lombardy to the postwar United States, is united by a constant interest in the relationship between the built environment and the construction of racial and class identities. In addition to her numerous scholarly articles, her publications include the co-edited volumes Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Sites Unseen:  Landscape and Vision (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). She is editor of a multidisciplinary volume titled Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), which won the Allen Noble book award from the Pioneer America Society.  She is the author of The Nature of Authority: Villa Culture, Landscape, and Representation in Eighteenth-Century Lombardy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), which received the Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award from the Society of Architectural Historians in 2006 and of Maybeck’s Landscapes: Drawing in Nature (William Stout Publisher, 2005). She is also the recipient of a 2006 Iris Foundation Award from the Bard Graduate Center, New York for outstanding scholarly contributions in the history of art, decorative arts, and cultural history. Harris is a past-president for the Society of Architectural Historians, for whom she also served as editor-in-chief of the Mellon Foundation-funded digital humanities initiative SAHARA and she is series editor for the University of Pittsburgh Press. Harris currently serves as chair of the Advisory Board for the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University and she is a board member for the International Built Works Registry, a project co-developed by Columbia University’s Avery Library and the ARTstor Digital Library.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians.

Related Links
Society of Architectural Historians
http://www.sah.org/about-sah/sah-news/2013/09/25/dianne-harris-talk---little-white-houses-race-space-and-the-ordinary-postwar-home

Lampo and the Graham Foundation are pleased to welcome Ben Vida, who will screen a new video work and premiere a four-channel electronics piece created especially for the event. In Tztztztzt Î Í Í…Vida presents the video realization of his long form sound poem of the same title, voiced by Sara Magenheimer, Tyondai Braxton, and Vida himself. Combining images of the vocalists’ performance with synthesized translations of these vocalizations, Vida explores the relationships between video and audio inputs and outputs. By doing so, his work aims to recalibrate the viewer’s senses, drawing attention to the processes by which we receive and decode information, and as Vida writes, “the brain’s ability to create order out of multi-sensory distortions.”

Vida will also perform Damaged Particulates, a new composition for fixed and live electronics presented in four-channel-expanded stereo. Organized into eleven short movements, Damaged Particulates derives its compositional strategy from the concept of “Particulate Systems Construction,” emphasizing the morphology and spatialization of single and dual-voiced sonic particulates. Although minimal in elements, Vida’s composition is at once sonically dense, grossly visceral, and disjunctively rhythmic. Here, sound objects take on an almost physical presence within the performance space, allowing spatialization to become a compositional material and discordant sonic composites to complicate traditional compositional logic.

Ben Vida (b. 1974, Dubuque, Iowa) is an artist, improviser, composer, and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He has been active in the international experimental music scene for the past seventeen years with a long list of collaborations, bands, and releases to his credit. He is the co-founder of the group Town and Country and has worked as a solo artist, releasing records under his own name and the moniker Bird Show on labels including PAN, Alku, Thrill Jockey, Drag City, Amish, Bottrop-Boy, Hapna, and Kranky. Vida has presented his work in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, South Korea, and Japan. Recent activities include performances at the Kitchen in New York with David Behrman, the debut of the Tyondai Braxton/Ben Vida Duo at the Sacrum Profamun festival in Krakow, a solo performance at Electrónica en Abril festival in Madrid, and the publication of his long form sound poem Tztztztzt Î Í Í ... by Shelter Press. Vida’s first solo exhibition, Slipping Control, opened at Audio Visual Arts in New York this past spring. He is currently an Artist in Residency at ISSUE Project Room and at the Clocktower in New York.

This performance is presented in partnership with Lampo. Founded in 1997, Lampo is a non-profit organization for experimental music, sound art, and intermedia projects. Visit www.lampo.org.

Theater Dome under construction, 1966

Drop City is the first feature-length documentary film about the artists who created a community of iconographic dwellings from the scrapheap of a wasteful society. Drop City's practices of art, architecture and sustainable living influenced a generation. Inspired by new theories and performances by Allan Kaprow, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and others at Black Mountain College, the Droppers created a form of conceptual art based on performance, random interactions, and found materials. Their experimental buildings and creative practices became a model for alternative communities throughout the world. In 1966, Buckminster Fuller honored Drop City with his Dymaxion Award for "poetically economic structural accomplishments." The Droppers were at the forefront of what is now called "techno-culture"—a do-it-yourself ethos of decentralized technology. The story is told through a stunning array of film footage, photos, and interviews with Drop City's former residents, including artists, poets, inventors and activists.

Joan Grossman is visiting professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. She is a media artist whose work spans public radio, documentary film, and video installation. Her work has been screened and broadcast in more than twenty countries. Her award-winning film The Port of Last Resort was broadcast by HBO.

Tom McCourt is an associate professor of media at Fordham University. He is the author of Conflicting Communication Interests in America: The Case of National Public Radio (Praeger, 1999) and coauthor (with Patrick Burkart) of Digital Music Wars: Ownership and Control of the Celestial Jukebox (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). He first encountered the story of Drop City more than twenty years ago and has researched its history and significance for several years.

Print Source: 7^th Art Releasing

Related Links
Drop City
http://grahamfoundation.org/grantees/207-drop-city

Microevent/Microenvironment, 1972. Photograph by Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, courtesy of Emilio Ambasz.

Please join us to celebrate the opening of Environments and Counter Environments. "Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,” MoMA, 1972 with curators Luca Molinari, Peter Lang, and Mark Wasiuta.

6PM - Discussion with exhibition curators
6:30-8:30PM - Opening Reception

For more information on the exhibition, Environments and Counter Environments. "Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,” MoMA, 1972, click here.

Livernois Corridor - Detroit's Next Hot Spot?

The nature of community development has evolved beyond the creation of long-term plans. Please join us as Monica Chadha and Virginia Stanard discuss how they create catalysts for communities through immediate actions and multidisciplinary partnerships in their work at Impact Detroit and in other neighborhood initiatives. Following the talk, Where If Not Us exhibition participant Michael Rios will start a brief discussion.

Monica Chadha is an architect and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Illinois Institute of Technology. Her practice addresses community revitalization. In 2009, Chadha co-founded Converge:Exchange and she is currently developing Impact Detroit:, a partnership with the Detroit Collaborative Design Center (University of Detroit Mercy). Chadha was previously a Project Manager at Studio Gang Architects and Ross Barney Architects. At IIT, Chadha has led a community engagement design studio focused on the redevelopment of Bronzeville (Chicago) and several core studios. She has presented at several conferences and has most recently been published in Reveal, Princeton Architectural Press 2010. Chadha received her Masters of Architecture degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Bachelor of Environmental Studies in Architecture from the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Virginia Stanard is the Director of Urban Design at the Detroit Collaborative Design Center and Co-Director of the Master of Community Development program at the University of Detroit Mercy. She holds master’s degrees in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the University of Virginia. Through practice and teaching, she advocates community development through the collaborative design process. At the DCDC, Virginia has developed economic and physical revitalization strategies at a range of scales and for a range of clients - including cities, philanthropic foundations, neighborhood groups, and developers. Recent projects include a greenway and development plan for daylighting the Bloody Run Creek on Detroit’s east side. Other projects include a development plan for Detroit’s Paradise Valley Cultural District, planning for Detroit Future City (formerly the Detroit Works Project Long Term Planning initiative), and revitalization strategies for Detroit’s 48217 and Woodbridge neighborhoods.

Impact Detroit, an initiative of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center (DCDC) at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture, was launched in 2011 to support Detroit’s capacity for community development. It is an initiative that provides expertise, knowledge, and resources to help implement community-driven strategies as they relate to the built environment. Impact Detroit will form a collective hub leveraging the interdisciplinary expertise of professionals, local organizations, emerging leaders and community stakeholders to foster collaboration and realize local projects.

Converge: Exchange is a platform for communities, activists and practitioners to share innovative design strategies in local economies and for the built environment.

Michael Rios is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Design and Chair of the Community Development Graduate Group at UC Davis. Formerly, Rios was the director of the Hamer Center for Community Design and the president of the Association of Community Design. Projects visited include: Organizing Public Interest Design, 1997-1999, revisited 2010 (Union Point Park, Oakland); A Public Transport Hub Becomes a Zócalo for Multiple Publics, 1995-1998, revisited 2010(Plaza del Colibri, San Francisco).

For more information on the exhibition, Where If Not Us? Participatory Design and Its Radical Approaches, click here.

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