GROUNDWORK: Between Landscape and Architecture

Friday, October 28, 2011, 7 - 9pm

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GROUNDWORK: Between Landscape and Architecture
Diana Balmori and Joel Sanders in conversation with Benjamin Aranda, Nicholas de Monchaux, Anthony Vidler, and Marion Weiss

Join Diana Balmori and Joel Sanders, who will discuss with Benjamin Aranda, Nicholas de Monchaux, Anthony Vidler, and Marion Weiss the idea of dissolving traditional distinctions between building and environmen. The program marks the occasion of the publication Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture (Monacelli, 2011) written by Diana Balmori and Joel Sanders.

As Balmori and Sanders note in their preface, the book “is an appeal to designers to pursue a new approach that overcomes the false dichotomy between architecture and landscape. Our interest in the union of these areas is motivated in part by urgent ecological concerns that we share with many of our colleagues. An integrated practice of landscape and architecture could have dramatic environmental consequences: the disciplines would cease to have separate agendas and would instead allow for buildings and landscapes to perform as linked interactive systems that heal the environment.

“Beyond any ecological agenda, what truly excites us about architecture and landscape joining forces is that it promises to be a catalyst for creativity…As the design professions and their allied fields work together to explore the potential of natural forms and processes to generate a new design vocabulary, landscape architects and architects need to adopt a more inclusive conception of the physical world. Rather than oppose space and matter, and as a consequence architecture and landscape, designers need to see them as an accumulation of independent processes as complex as any machine or, indeed, any creature.”

Diana Balmori, Founder, Balmori Associates
Joel Sanders, Principal, Joel Sanders Architect.
Anthony Vidler, Dean, The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union
Nicholas de Monchaux, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, UC Berkeley
Benjamin Aranda, Principal, Aranda/Lasch
Marion Weiss, Co-founder, Weiss/Manfredi Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism

Co-sponsored by the Architecture League of New York

Admission is free for League members and The Cooper Union students/faculty/staff, and $15 for non-members.
 

Located in The Great Hall, in the Foundation Building, 7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues

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  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.