[Image: Dubai's "carbon-neutral" ziggurat, designed by Timelinks].
I'll be in Chicago next week to host a panel on Saturday, November 8, as part of this year's Chicago Humanities Festival. The other participants are Joseph Grima, Jeffrey Inaba, and Sam Jacob.
More info:
Look abroad: Whole cities are planned, built, and inhabited in less than a generation. Artificial islands, indoor ski slopes, and the world’s tallest this-and-that are being constructed, not in the West, but in the Middle East, China, and beyond. The result: a sense that the West’s cities are falling behind and, increasingly, watching from the sidelines. A dynamic panel will discuss the accuracy of this assessment of today’s architectural situation. What are the urban implications of so-called offshoring audacity and how can the phenomenon be described without resorting to nationalism, nostalgia, or even uncritical celebration?
The panelists will be Joseph Grima, executive director of New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture and author of Instant Asia; Jeffrey Inaba, principal architect, Inaba Projects, and professor of architecture at SCI-Arc and Columbia University; and Sam Jacob, visiting professor at Yale University and founding director, Fashion Architecture Taste, a London-based practice. The discussion will be moderated by Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDGBLOG and senior editor of Dwell magazine.
The panel, called Offshoring Audacity, will begin at 2:30pm, lasting till 4:00, and it will take place at the Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark Street. It costs $5.
I hope some Chicago-basedreaders might stop by.
[Image: Park Gate, Dubai, by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture].
The overall theme for the Humanities Festival this year is "big ideas," inspired by architect Daniel Burnham's (possibly apocryphal) statement that one should "make no little plans." Since we're coming up on the 100-year anniversary of Burnham's urban plan for Chicago, not only does a "big