Keith Krumwiede: Stories from Another America

Thursday, February 23, 2017, 6 - 8pm

Add to Calendar

Image
Keith Krumwiede, Don Barthelmismo Meets with Workers at The Palace, Freedomland, after Capital and Labour, 1874, by Henry Stacy Marks

Keith Krumwiede, Don Barthelmismo Meets with Workers at The Palace, Freedomland, after Capital and Labour, 1874, by Henry Stacy Marks

Keith Krumwiede is a writer and designer whose work has been widely published and exhibited. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley and the Southern California Institute of Architecture and has taught at Rice University, Yale University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he is currently an associate professor and the director of graduate architecture programs. He is the author of Atlas of Another America: An Architectural Fiction, from Park Books and is currently a visiting associate professor in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Masquerading as a historical architectural treatise, Keith Krumwiede’s book Atlas of Another America seamlessly mixes fact and fiction to imagine counterfactual histories of—or, if read forward instead of backward, speculative sociopolitical futures for—the American Dream. The book’s strangely familiar visions draw on a long lineage of social and architectural thought—including the communitarian longings of Owen and Fourier, the mythic reconstructions of Piranesi, the utopian typologies of Ledoux, the critical hyper-realities of Archizoom’s No-Stop City, and the collaged counter-city of Rem Koolhaas’ Exodus. Through the artful appropriation, exaggeration, and reorganization of found forms, images, and words, Atlas of Another America argues for the value of critical misreadings in advancing architectural thought and action.

This event will be held in conjunction with the exhibition "Selections from Atlas of Another America." Copies of the book may be purchased at a discounted price during the span of the exhibition here by submitting "PR20ATLAS" in the promo code field at checkout. 

Open to current Cooper Union students, faculty, and staff. Room 315F. 

Located at 7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues

  • 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.