Enfilade

From the conference website:

Cambridge Conference Talks VII: Architecture and the Street
Harvard University, Cambridge, 29 March 2013

Organized by Morgan Ng and Jason Nguyen

The PhD program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design is pleased to invite you to the seventh annual Cambridge Talks conference, entitled Architecture and the Street, which will take place on Friday, March 29, 2013, 9:00-4:30, in Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall.

No building is an island – and in the context of the city, architecture takes shape in relation to the street. Arcades and façade treatments, lighting fixtures and shop windows, setback and building height restrictions: each of these mediate how buildings interact with streets as spaces of visual display and public sociability. More recently, the construction of flyovers and underground transport systems has transformed streets into ever-more complex, multi-layered spatial armatures for architectural intervention. Streets serve as the liminal zones by which architectural form and symbolism meet with the contingencies of urban life.

Cambridge Talks VII seeks to bring fresh historical themes and tools to bear on the problem of Architecture and the Street. New research promises to enrich and challenge perspectives pioneered by Spiro Kostof, Jane Jacobs, and William H. Whyte. How does the infrastructural function of streets as circulation (of people, goods, water, and waste) press against the static character of architecture? How do streets serve as the spatial framework for social control, ceremony, procession, and protest? How might we theorize and historicize modern streets as sites of cultural memory and nostalgia? And above all, what are the effects of such social, political, and technological forces on architectural form?

Cambridge Talks is generously supported by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs & the GSAS Graduate Student Council. The event is free and open to the public.

P R O G R A M

9:00  Breakfast

9:30  Introduction

9:45  Session I: The Street between Infrastructure and Architectural Form
• Katherine Rinne (California College of the Arts), Walking on Water in Rome: Streets and Water in the Baroque City
• Richard Wittman (UC Santa Barbara), Architecture, Authority and the Street in Eighteenth-Century Paris
• Eric Mumford (WashU), CIAM, Sert and the Street
Discussion, moderated by Sonja Duempelmann (Harvard)

11:15  Break

11:30  Session II: The Street as Territorial Network
• Gabrielle Esperdy (NJIT), The Street, the Strip, and the Freeway: On the Legibility of Place in the Territories of the Car
• Ateya Khorakiwala (Harvard), Street Paint: A Story of India’s National Development
• Keller Easterling (Yale), No Road
Discussion, moderated by Brian Goldstein (Harvard)

1:00  Lunch Break

2:30  Session III: The Street as Space of Social Protest and Control
• Cesare Birignani (Harvard), The Trouble with the Street
• Christopher Heuer (Princeton) and Matthew Jesse Jackson (UChicago), 7 March 1965: Selma and the Architecture of the Event
• Mariana Mogilevich (NYU), Street Psychology and the Politics of Pedestrianization
Discussion, moderated by Neil Brenner (Harvard)

4:30  Closing Remarks