A former design critic, Victoria Milne will discuss the gory and glamorous process of developing art and design projects for the City of New York. Her responsibilities range in scale from the design of event nametags to developing policy for architecture.

Victoria Milne is Director of Creative Services at NYC’s Department of Design and Construction (DDC), where she manages percent for art projects for DDC, runs an in-house graphic design team and is involved in policy projects. DDC manages the capital programs for most mayoral agencies, and has a combined streets and buildings budget of over $8 billion per year. Prior to joining DDC in 1999 Milne was a contributing editor for Dwell and Blueprint magazines, and editor-in-chief of Glass magazine. She curated exhibitions, including “The Pull of Beauty” at the Storefront for Art and Architecture and the National Building Museum, and the first museum show of industrial design in the Northwest at the Tacoma Art Museum.

The Fall 2010 Design Criticism MFA Lecture Series is open to the public. You are warmly invited to attend our lectures, to see our new department and to meet with speakers, faculty members and students over a drink. Space is limited; RSVP to dcrit@sva.edu.

This lecture explores the emergence of mapping as a research and visualization method used by writers and designers to reveal agendas and uncover potential.

Peter Hall is a design critic, and senior lecturer in design at the University of Texas at Austin. He writes regularly for Metropolis magazine and his books include Else/Where: Mapping—New Cartographies of Networks and Territories, Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, and Sagmeister: Made You Look. He is co-organizer of DesignInquiry, a non-profit educational organization.

The Fall 2010 Design Criticism MFA Lecture Series is open to the public. You are warmly invited to attend our lectures, to see our new department and to meet with speakers, faculty members and students over a drink. Space is limited; RSVP to dcrit@sva.edu.

"The PT Barnum of the Mind," Riva Lehrer

For the past decade, in the National Book Critics Circle Award winning “Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences,” and in the ongoing contest that book spawned on the Mcsweeneys.net website, Lawrence Weschler has been exploring the way images (principally, but poems, musical themes, etc. as well) set a context for the reception of subsequent instances. We see by way of what we have already seen. We create by way of our entire prior sensorium. In this talk, Weschler will consider a spectrum of such convergent effects, from apophenia (the tendency of humans to see patterns where none exist) through co-causation, fractalization, influence (forward and backward, direct and unconscious), homage, apprenticeship, allusion, quotation, appropriation, cryptonesia (verbatim appropriation without realizing you’re doing so), through outright plagiarism… Fun for everyone.

LAWRENCE WESCHLER, a graduate of Cowell College of the University of California at Santa Cruz (1974), was for over twenty years (1981-2002) a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies.  He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award (for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992) and was also a recipient of Lannan Literary Award (1998).

His books of political reportage include The Passion of Poland (1984); A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (1990); and Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas (1998). His “Passions and Wonders” series currently comprises Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982); David Hockney’s Cameraworks (1984); Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995); A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces (1998) Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999); Robert Irwin: Getty Garden (2002); Vermeer in Bosnia (2004); and now Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences (February 2006).   Mr. Wilson was shortlisted for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Everything that Rises received the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticsm.

Recent books include a considerably expanded edition of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, comprising thirty years of conversations with Robert Irwin; a companion volume, True to Life: Twenty Five Years of Conversation with David Hockney; Tara Donovan, the catalog for the artist’s recent exhibition at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art, and Deborah Butterfield, the catalog for a survey of the artist’s work at the LA Louver Gallery.

Weschler has taught, variously, at Princeton, Columbia, UCSC, Bard, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, and NYU, where he is now distinguished writer in residence at the Carter Journalism Institute. He is currently director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, where he has been a fellow since 1991, and from which base he is trying to start his own semiannual journal of writing and visual culture, Omnivore. He concurrently holds the position of artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival.He is also a contributing editor to McSweeney’s, the Threepeeny Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review; curator at large of the DVD quarterly Wholphin; (recently retired) chair of the Sundance (formerly Soros) Documentary Film Fund; and director of the Ernst Toch Society, dedicated to the promulgation of the music of his grandfather, the noted Weimar emigre composer.

Once, happening upon a Portuguese edition of Weschler’s 1990 book on torture in Latin America during a photo opportunity in a Rio shopping mall, Chilean General Augusto Pinochet flipped through its pages for a few moments, whereupon he pronounced, “Lies, all lies.  The author is a liar and a hypocrite.”

The Fall 2010 Design Criticism MFA Lecture Series is open to the public. You are warmly invited to attend our lectures, to see our new department and to meet with speakers, faculty members and students over a drink. Space is limited; RSVP to dcrit@sva.edu as soon as possible.

Pilar Viladas, Design Editor, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, will discuss her work as a magazine editor and writer, and how doing both involves constantly alternating between two different mindsets. She will show examples of stories she has done in her 13 years at the Times, and how they illustrate the orchestration of storytelling by verbal and visual means.

Pilar Viladas is the design editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine. She has worked as an editor and/or writer at Interiors, Progressive Architecture, HG and Architectural Digest, in addition to the Times. She received a BA in Art History from Harvard, and was a Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is the author of three books, including Domesticities: At Home With The New York Times Magazine.

The Fall 2010 Design Criticism MFA Lecture Series is open to the public. You are warmly invited to attend our lectures, to see our new department and to meet with speakers, faculty members and students over a drink. Space is limited; RSVP to dcrit@sva.edu.

Mark Lamster is at work on a biography of the late architect Philip Johnson. His last book was a political biography of the painter Peter Paul Rubens. For more than a decade, he was an editor at Princeton Architectural Press, in New York. His writing on architecture and design appears regularly in magazines, newspapers, and online.

The Fall 2010 Design Criticism MFA Lecture Series is open to the public. You are warmly invited to attend our lectures, to see our new department and to meet with speakers, faculty members and students over a drink. Space is limited; RSVP to dcrit@sva.edu.

Join us at the D-Crit Open House on Saturday November 6, from 2:00–4:00 p.m.

For more info about the program, download the D-Crit section of the new SVA Graduate Catalog, or fill out SVA’s online form to have a catalog sent to you via mail. If you have specific questions and would like to speak to us directly, feel free to contact Emily Weiner at eweiner1@sva.edu or 212.592.2228.

Christopher Hawthorne will discuss the prospects for architecture—and architecture criticism—in an era of economic uncertainty and ecological upheaval. How can architecture maintain its relevance in a culture drained of capital for new construction, and facing new environmental catastrophes on a depressingly regular basis? And how should architecture critics react to these new realities? Part of the answer lies in renovating some old or overlooked concepts in architecture and criticism, including the vacant, the temporary and the slightly worn.

Christopher Hawthorne is architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, where he writes about new and old buildings, sustainability, planning, transit and the lives of cities. He was previously architecture critic for Slate. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The Washington Post, Domus, Volume, Metropolis, ReadyMade, Architectural Record, Harvard Design Magazine and many other publications. With Alanna Stang, he is the author of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press).

The Fall 2010 Design Criticism MFA Lecture Series is open to the public. You are warmly invited to attend our lectures, to see our new department and to meet with speakers, faculty members and students over a drink. Space is limited; RSVP to dcrit@sva.edu.

This lecture will revisit Austrian émigré architect Bernard Rudofsky’s reflections on questions of legibility in architectural form and graphic design during the 1950s, or more specifically his thoughts on how they might be pushed to the limits of their functionality. Emerging in the context of his encounter with modernity in Japan, Rudofsky imagined prospects for an entropic paradigm of communication breakdown, articulating possibilities for a visually unstable, disorienting and multiplicitous environment of signification.

Felicity D. Scott is director of the program in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (CCCP) at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University.  She is also a founding co-editor of Grey Room, a quarterly journal of architecture, art, media, and politics published quarterly by MIT Press since Fall 2000. Her work as an architectural historian and theorist focuses on articulating genealogies of political and theoretical engagement with questions of technological transformation within modern and contemporary architecture, as well as within the discourses and institutions that have shaped and defined the discipline. In addition to publishing numerous articles in journals, magazines, and edited anthologies, her book, Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics After Modernism, was published by MIT Press in 2007, and another book, Living Archive 7: Ant Farm, appeared on ACTAR Editorial in May 2008.  She is currently working to complete the manuscript for a book on the Austrian émigré architect Bernard Rudofsky, entitled Cartographies of Drift: Bernard Rudofsky’s Encounters with Modernity, and has undertaken substantial research and writing on her subsequent book-project, Outlaw Territory, which investigates architecture’s relation to “human unsettlement” and territorial insecurity.

The Fall 2010 Design Criticism MFA Lecture Series is open to the public. You are warmly invited to attend our lectures, to see our new department and to meet with speakers, faculty members and students over a drink. Space is limited; RSVP to dcrit@sva.edu.