In what sense is the 21st century world urban? In this lecture, Neil Brenner critiques contemporary ideologies of the "urban age," which confront this question with reference to the purported fact that more than 50% of the world's population resides within cities. Against such demographic, city-centric understandings, Brenner excavates Henri Lefebvre's (1970) notion of generalized urbanization for conceptual and methodological insights into the 21st century planetary urban condition. He argues that the geographies of urbanization can no longer be conceptualized with reference to cities, metropolitan regions or even megalopolises, but today encompass diverse patterns and pathways across the planetary sociospatial landscape, from Manhattan to the Matterhorn, from the Pearl River Delta to Mount Everest, from the Nile River valley to the Pacific Ocean. This variegated urban fabric must become the focal point for new approaches to urban theory, strategies of collective intervention and imaginaries of built environments.

Neil Brenner is Professor of Urban Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the coordinator of the newly founded Urban Theory Lab GSD. He previously served as Professor of Sociology and Metropolitan Studies, and as an affiliated faculty member of the American Studies Program at New York University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago (1999); an MA in Geography from UCLA (1996); and a BA in Philosophy from Yale College (1991).

This talk is co-presented by the Chicago Expander at Archeworks and the Graham Foundation.

The Chicago Expander at Archeworks aims to spatialize the formation of Chicago as a larger geographic entity and recasts the city and its region as a spatial model. The program is directed by Iker Gil and Antonio Petrov.

Archeworks is a multidisciplinary design educator that advances design in the public interest and inspires collaborative action to shape more healthy, sustainable and equitable communities.

Esra Akcan, Freedom of Information (collage portraying International Building Exhibition (IBA) buildings, printed on satellite dish), Istanbul Design Biennale, 2012.

This talk will explore the International Building Exhibition (IBA’1984/87), which commissioned acclaimed architects from all over Europe and North America to transform the predominantly Turkish immigrant neighborhood Kreuzberg in Berlin. Architects brought in for the design of public housing projects included Aldo Rossi, Rob Krier, Oswald Matthias Ungers, Alvaro Siza, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, John Hejduk and many others. Akcan discusses this urban renewal project as a microcosm of the history of urban housing, a significant moment in the postmodernist and deconstructionist debates in architecture throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and an example of the attendant relationship between housing and international immigration policies. Using a narrative genre inspired by oral history and storytelling, Akcan gives voice not only to the architects and policy makers, but also to the immigrant inhabitants. Research related to this talk was recently featured in Akcan’s contribution to the Istanbul Design Biennale, 2012: “Urban Renewal and its Discontents: Kreuzberg—IBA ’84/87.”

Esra Akcan is an assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her architecture degree from Middle East Technical University and her Ph.D. and postdoctoral degrees from Columbia University. She has taught at Columbia University, New School, Pratt Institute, METU, and Humboldt University. Akcan has received awards and fellowships from the Graham Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin, the Clark Institute, the Getty Research Institute, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Mellon Foundation, DAAD, Kinne, and KRESS/ARIT. She is the author of Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House (Duke University Press, 2012), Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (co-author Sibel Bozdoğan, Reaktion, 2012), (Land)Fill Istanbul (124/3, 2004), and Çeviride Modern Olan (YKY, 2009).

Following the lecture, both of Akcan’s recent books, published with the support of the Graham Foundation, Architecture in Translation and Turkey: Modern Architectures in History, will be available for purchase in the Graham bookshop.

Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective Massimo Scolari. For more on this graham funded project, see: grahamfoundation.org/grantees/4885-on-drawing-and-architecture-massimo-scolari-the-representation-of-architecture-1967-2012

Please join us for our annual holiday gathering and book sale. All books will be discounted at least 10%, with some titles up to 35%. The Graham bookshop is a perfect place to round out your holiday shopping with new and classic architecture titles from monographs to history and theory.

Related Links
http://grahamfoundation.org/grantees/4885-on-drawing-and-architecture-massimo-scolari-the-representation-of-architecture-1967-2012

David Getsy and Yelena Kalinsky will present a pair of illustrated talks on the documentation of performance, particularly as it relates to temporality, participation and memory in the late '60s/early '70s performance work of artist Scott Burton and the ongoing work of Russian conceptual performance group, Collective Actions. This event is a celebration of Getsy's and Kalinsky's respective publications, Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965-1975 and Collective Actions: Audience Recollections from the First Five Years, 1976-1981, both of which were recently published by Chicago-based Soberscove Press. The talks will be followed by a reception in the Madlener House library where signed copies of the publications will be for sale.

David J. Getsy is the Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Educated at Oberlin College and holding a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Getty Foundation, the Kress Foundation, and Dartmouth College. His books include Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (Yale University Press, 2010) and Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (Yale University Press, 2004) as well as the edited anthologies From Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play, and Twentieth-Century Art (Penn State University Press, 2011) and Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, c.1880-1930 (Ashgate, 2004). His research focuses on the history and theory of modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on histories of sculpture and performance.

Yelena Kalinsky is an art historian whose dissertation, Collective Actions: Moscow Conceptualism, Performance, and the Archive, 1976-1989, offers an in-depth art historical treatment of Collective Actions in English. Her translations of Collective Actions' documentary and theoretical writings can be found on-line at conceptualism.letov.ru. Yalinsky was a Fulbright Fellow in Russia and curated Performing the Archive: Collective Actions in the 1970s & 1980s (2008-09) at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, where she also did her doctoral work.

Soberscove Press is a Chicago-based press that publishes art-related material, including artists' books, out-of-print transcripts, and artists' writings.

Many architectural publications glorify iconic architecture through photographs of buildings taken from the outside or through images of sparsely furnished interiors devoid of people. Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies shows life in Lafayette Park—a collection of residential buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe in downtown Detroit—from the inside out and documents the point of view of its homeowners, tenants, and staff.

Graphic designers and co-editors, Danielle Aubert and Natasha Chandani, will speak about the new book, and contributor Noah Resnick will talk about the design and operation of the buildings’ grounds, designed by landscape architect Alfred Caldwell, from his perspective as a Lafayette Park resident.

Danielle Aubert is a professor of graphic design at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 2008 she collaborated with Lana Cavar on the design for the book ReFusing Fashion: Rei Kawakubo for the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. More recently, she collaborated with Dutch designers Mevis and van Deursen on MEC (Steidl Press, 2010) about the work of artist Mary Ellen Carroll. Her work has appeared in various exhibitions and design publications, including Wired and Metropolis magazines. Her book 16 Months Worth of Drawing Exercises in Microsoft Excel was published in 2006 by Various Projects. Danielle holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Virginia and an MFA in graphic design from Yale University.

Natasha Chandani is based in New York City. She has worked on a number of publications with clients in the United States, the Netherlands, the UK and India. For several years she worked as a designer for the architecture publication Volume. She collaborated with Dutch designer Irma Boom on the design of Al Manakh (with editors Rem Koolhaas, Ole Bouman and Mark Wigley), a study of the current condition of the Gulf for the International Design Forum in Dubai, 2007. She most recently worked on American Craft magazine.

Noah Resnick currently teaches and practices in Detroit. He is the director of graduate architecture at the University of Detroit Mercy and a founding principal of uRbanDetail, an intimate research-based architecture and urban design studio that operates under the interrelated concepts of the architectonics of multiple scales; the architect as urban collaborator; and the architect as community builder. Noah earned his BArch from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and completed his Masters of Science in Architecture Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies is co-edited by Danielle Aubert, Lana Cavar, Natasha Chandani and published by Metropolis Books, 2012.

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