RESERVATIONS FOR THIS EVENT ARE FULL.

Graham Foundation grantees and authors Igor Marjanovic and Katerina Rüedi Ray will discuss their recently published book, Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg’s Urban Vision.

Chicago has many iconic buildings, but perhaps none as instantly recognizable as Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City. Occupying an entire city block—number 1 of the original town of Chicago—the mixed-use riverside complex consists of two cylindrical sixty-five-story residential towers, a saddle-shaped auditorium, a midrise office building, and a rectangular podium comprising an open plaza with a variety of services. Each tower contains more than four hundred apartments and a continuous, upward-spiraling ramp of parking spaces. Built between 1960 and 1967 at a time when Chicagoans were fleeing to the suburbs, the hugely ambitious project was architect Goldberg’s collaborative attempt at urban revitalization—as he called it, “a city within a city.”

Igor Marjanovic and Katerina Rüedi Ray here present the first history of this architectural landmark. Featuring newly available archival texts, photographs, and drawings, this unique building’s biography explores not only its architectural achievements, but also the ingenious marketing campaign and complex network of political partnerships necessary to realize Goldberg’s urban vision. As the architect’s beautifully designed brochures detailed, Marina City offered residents a self-contained world that included a theater, restaurant, bowling alley, health club, ice-skating rink, grocery store, a bank, and much more. It is no wonder that before it was finished 2,500 applications had been submitted to rent 896 apartments. From financing to the structural engineering, this one-of-a-kind volume fills in missing chapters of modern architecture, urban politics, and labor history.

Igor Marjanovic is assistant professor of architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. Katerina Rüedi Ray is director and professor of the School of Art at Bowling Green State University. Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg's Urban Vision was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation. Books will be available for purchase after the talk.

Reservations for this event are full.

Lionel Marchetti will present a two-hour musique concrète performance, an “interpretation with spatialization,” layering nature recordings, spoken text, pop songs and ethnic music through eight loudspeakers distributed around the Madlener House ballroom. Once on site, Marchetti will study the acoustics of the space and select appropriate works from his 20-year body of work.

The evening, brought to you by Lampo and the Graham Foundation, will be divided into two parts, each with its own direction and theme—perhaps “the natural world” or “human psychology,” or “shamanism,” a favorite of Marchetti’s, who sees parallels between the medicine man and composer, both as someone who transports you into another world.

Lionel Marchetti (b. 1967, Marseille, France) is an electroacoustic improviser and musique concrète composer. Initially self-taught, Marchetti studied with Xavier Garcia in Grenoble. A scholar, he later worked at the CFMI (Lyon) and INA-GRM studios (Paris), and published a book on composer Michel Chion.

In the mid-1990s Marchetti was one of a handful of artists who took electroacoustic music out of the academic studio and into the realm of free improv, using a live set-up with microphones, small speakers, tape recorders and radio.  As an improviser he performs in his long-standing duo with Jérôme Noetinger, in the audio-visual project Le Cube, with influential collective Archipel, and with dancer Yôko Higashi. In his studio work he incorporates sound collage and electroacoustic composition, although the level of poetry and refusal of genre boundaries in his music puts him closer to Kristoff K. Roll and Luc Ferrari than Pierre Henry or Bernard Parmegiani. Lionel Marchetti made his U.S. debut at Lampo in June 2002, in a duo performance with Jérôme Noetinger.

Presented in partnership with Lampo.

Founded in 1997, Lampo is a non-profit organization for experimental music, sound art and intermedia projects. For information and to add your name to the Lampo list, contact info@lampo.org or visit www.lampo.org.

Talk: 5:30pm
Opening Reception: 6pm - 8pm

Artist Felipe Dulzaides and architect Roberto Gottardi will talk about the exhibition, Utopía Posible, and the School of Dramatic Arts. Please join us at a reception after the talk for the opening of the show. 

Roberto Gottardi (Venice, 1927) is an architect and teacher living and working in Havana, Cuba. He studied at the Istituto Superiore d'Archittetura in Venice where he was a pupil of Carlo Scarpa, Franco Albini and Luigi Piccinato. Gottardi moved to Cuba in 1961 and promptly began work on his design for the School of Dramatic Arts. He has practiced and taught architecture and stage design there since.

Felipe Dulzaides (Cuba, 1965) is a visual artist whose work spans photography, installation, performance, video, and public art. Dulzaides' work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (Berlin), Redcat (Los Angeles), and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), among other venues. He is the recipient of prestigious awards including, the Cintas Fellowship 2001, the Creative Work Fund 2004 - 2005 and the 2010 Rome Prize. Dulzaides studied drama at the Instituto Superior de Arte and holds a Master of Fine Arts in New Genres from San Francisco Art Institute.

Utopía Posible was selected by Okwui Enwezor for the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008) and featured in the 10th Havana Biennial (2009). The Graham Foundation presentation is the first in the United States, and features new work.

Space for the talk is limited, to make reservations email: rsvp@grahamfoundation.org or call 312.787.4071.

For more information on the exhibition, Utopía Posible, click here.

Victory Garden Seed Library

Amy Franceschini is a pollinator who creates formats for exchange and production that question and challenge the social, cultural and environmental systems that surround her. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature. Her projects reveal the ways that local politics are affected by globalization. In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers, an international collective of artists. In 2004, Amy co-founded Free Soil, an international collective of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners who work together to propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental organization of space. Free Soil has exhibited internationally and received funding from the Danish Arts Council, and Zero One, San Jose to create temporary public art projects. Amy’s solo and collaborative work have been exhibited internationally at ZKM, Whitney Museum, the New York Museum of Modern Art and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. She received her BFA from San Francisco State University and her MFA from Stanford University. Amy is a professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco and a visiting artist at California College of the Arts Fine Arts Graduate program. Amy was awarded a grant from the Graham Foundation in 2008 for her project Victory Gardens 2007+.

Related Links
Free Soil
http://www.free-soil.org
Atlas Magazine
http://www.atlasmagazine.com

For more information on the exhibition, Actions: What You Can Do With the City, click here.

The Kaisersrot “Stadtigel” at the NAI in Rotterdam, 2009.

Just recently Alex Lehnerer published the book Grand Urban Rules with 010 Publishers, Rotterdam. Grand Urban Rules is a tribute to the city’s will to form, manifest in its vast number of steering regimes. The book contains a total of 115 significant ingredients for the Grand Projet of our contemporary metropolis. Not always positive but always powerful, these rules are the inverted, abstracted and extracted image of a city’s actual situation. Setting standards is first and foremost a cultural act. You can read cities by their rules! Rules link the physical with the social city, connecting quality with quantity and latent characteristics to manifest ones. Thereby and almost unnoticed, they have become design instruments. In fact, regarding rules as tools offers a valuable (urban) design attitude – departing from an approach that wants to control everything, and moving towards a non–fatalistic form of control between freedom and coercion.

Alex will discuss the content of the book and show its relevance for designers by relating it to other (urban design) projects of his. A limited amount of books will be available for sale.

Alex Lehnerer is an architect and urban designer, received his PhD from the ETH in Zurich where he was also a lecturer before moving to the US. With his studio he is currently based in Chicago where he holds a position as Asst. Professor at the University of Illinois, School of Architecture. He is partner of the urban research practice Kaisersrot in Zurich (CH) and ALSO-Architekten.

Related Links
http://www.010.nl/catalogue/book.php?id=666
http://www.alexlehnerer.com

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