A panel discussion including American and Danish architects will analyze the benefits, compromises, and challenges in creating and designing sustainable buildings and communities in the U.S. and Denmark.

The panel, which includes architects Stephen Kieran of the well-known Philadelphia firm Kieran Timberlake and Bjarke Ingels, head of the architectural practice Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), will explore the differences and similarities in the energy-saving measures used by architects in each country.

Since the U.S. and Denmark vary greatly in size, climatic conditions, and commonly-used building materials and energy-saving features, the discussion will examine how each country can learn from the other. The moderator of the discussion is Suzanne Stephens, deputy editor of Architectural Record.

The discussion will take place next Monday, November 16 at 6:30 pm at the Scandinavia House, 58 Park Avenue at 38th street, New York.

The transformation of the urban landscape within the last decades has increasingly been dominated by the demands of capitalist utilization. Due to the current crisis, however, which goes far beyond a mere crisis of the real estate and financial market, these neoliberal politics and attendant forms of production of space have been subject to a loss of legitimation. For this reason, not only do the dominance and promises of the privatization model, the free market and private property have to be questioned, but also the conventions of the space-producing professions that follow and materialize these policies.

In this context the event “Ten Days for Oppositional Architecture” takes up the task of exploring possibilities and conditions of a socially committed architectural practice. Therefore the narrow boundaries of the profession have to be left behind. We hence invite activists, geographers, architects, planners, and economists representing different critical approaches to discuss and develop concepts and practices that not only try to oppose and challenge the capitalist mode of production of space, but also try to go beyond it – strategies of de-commodification, re-appropriation and alternative production of space. We will look at already existing spatial actions of resistance as well as search for possibilities to further theorize them: How can these strategies and alternative practices be turned into social and political forces towards post-capitalist spaces?

From November 12 to November 21, New York City. For more information, click here.

The Parametric Design Workshop will take place in New York on December 5. This workshop will focus on the conceptual context and technical understanding of parametric design through a carefully constructed 2-day curriculum.

Participants will learn to engage the parametric modeling plug-in Grasshopper in a meaningful and productive way that draws upon the collective sensibility present in the group.

Emphasis will be placed on strategies for deploying constraint-based design, associative modeling techniques, and environmental influencers for parametric geometry creation, analysis, and documentation.

Attendance will be capped at 15 to provide each participant maximum one-on-one time with instructors. For more information click here.