The act of creating new objects from scratch is often no longer possible for the professional architect given the social and economic contexts of our contemporary world. In some societies, building booms during periods of high economic growth have resulted in a collection of contemporary ruins that are now neglected due to a lack of resources or lack of need for their use. In other contexts, architecture emerges as a result of decision-making processes that allocate minimal resources to the basic human need of habitation. A contradiction thus exists between the architecture commonly presented by the media as finished forms frozen in time, and architecture that has the capacity to evolve, adapt, and transform.
This event is organized in collaboration with the project “Unfinished,” curated by Iñaqui Carnicero and Carlos Quintans for the Spanish Pavilion of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.
On Saturday, February 27th, Storefront for Art and Architecture and The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union will jointly present a public conference, Closed World: Encounters That Never Happened. Presenters and discussants will engage in debate and discussion and the history and future of closed systems in architecture and design.
The format of this conference invites participants to impersonate a historical figures who have been major contributors to the discourse of closed systems. Figures include Reyner Banham, Buckminster Fuller, Hans Hollein, Neil Armstrong, Jacques Cousteau, and Walt Disney, among others.
