The Visual Resources Collection (VRC) at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) has released the second phase of their online database, now containing 20,000 images of architectural plans, sections, diagrams and photographs. The Avery/GSAPP Architectural Plans & Sections Collection contains images related to GSAPP’s history of modern architecture curriculum, which focuses on the history of modern buildings, with an emphasis of 20th century Modernism.
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), named after the Queen and Her Consort, has its foundations in the Great Exhibition of 1851 amidst the wealth, innovation and squalor of the Industrial Revolution. Britain was flooded by prosperity which allowed for the development of major new institutions to collect and exhibit objects of cultural significance or artistic value. The institute’s first director, Henry Cole, declared that it should be “a schoolroom for everyone,” and a democratic approach to its relationship with public life has remained the cornerstone of the V&A. Not only has it always been free of charge but it was also the first to open late hours (made possible by gas lighting), allowing a more comprehensive demographic of visitor.
Their latest exhibition, which opens today, seeks to realign the museum’s vast collection and palatial exhibition spaces in South Kensington with these founding concepts. The interventions of All of This Belongs to You attempt to push the V&A’s position as an extension of London’s civic and cultural built environment to the fore, testing the museum’s ability to act as a 21st century public institution. To do this in London, a city where the notion of public and private is increasingly blurred, has resulted in a sequence of compelling installations which are tied together through their relevance either in subject matter, technique, or topicality.
Critical Shifts is a one-day, student-organized symposium dedicated to exploring the ongoing transformations of critical practice in architecture. The event brings together a diverse group of practitioners in order to investigate how their work (which often combines the activities and approaches of curation, editing, writing, design, teaching, and research) can begin to trace a nuanced map of the fieldʼs current critical terrain.
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Mark Wigley with Kenneth Frampton, during the filming of The Glass House: “Conversations in Context”. Image Courtesy of http://vimeo.com/44405886
Mark Wigley announced Monday that he will be stepping down as dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) at the end of the academic year in 2014.
https://www.archdaily.com/431160/mark-wigley-steps-down-as-dean-of-columbia-university-s-gsappJose Luis Gabriel Cruz
Last monday, Columbia University's Avery Hall was buzzing.
The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) hosted a highly attended event that welcomed respected academics and professionals from architecture and real estate to what the dean, Mark Wigley, warned might take the form a a celebrity roast. Vishaan Chakrabarti, a partner at SHoP Architects and director of the Center for Urban Real Estate at Columbia, was on deck to deliver an abridged, more "urban version" of a longer lecture on his new book, A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America. Proceeding the twenty minute lecture, an "A-list" panel of architects and historians - that included Kenneth Frampton, Gwendolyn Wright, Bernard Tschumi, Laurie Hawkinson and Reinhold Martin - lined up to discuss Chakrabarti's work.
https://www.archdaily.com/430538/a-country-of-cities-a-manifesto-for-an-urban-americaJose Luis Gabriel Cruz
Tonight, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) Studio-X NYC welcomes Fast Company’s Greg Lindsay and the Institute for the Future’s Anthony Townsend for the first of a new series of events focused on the “smart city”.
“Lindsay and Townsend are calling the series “X-Cities,” where X marks the spot at which information technology and mega-urbanization converge. In this first session, the pair will lay out their respective cases for the top-down, intelligent design of “smart cities” versus the bottom-up evolution of crowd-sourced “civic laboratories.” Is information technology a real tool for city-building? And, if so, what is its bright and/or scary future?”
This event will begin at 6:30PM at 180 Varick Street in New York. It is free and open to the public. No RSVP is required. Continue reading for more information.
Columbia UniversityGSAPP Presents their fourth conference on architecture, engineering and materials March 30 to April 1 at Wood Auditorium in Avery Hall. Permanent Change: Plastics in Architecture and Engineering explores the boundaries between architecture, engineering and materials science by mobilizing symposia, studios, exhibitions, books and films in an intensely focused investigation.
Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) will launch Studio-X Rio this week with Dean Mark Wigley in attendance. Studio-X Rio is GSAPP’s global network of advanced research laboratories for exploring the future of cities. With locations in Amman, Beijing, Moscow, Mumbai, New York, and now Rio de Janeiro, it is the first truly global network for real-time exchange of projects, people, and ideas between regional leadership cities in which the best minds from Columbia University can think together with the best minds in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia.
