Eventually Everything: The 2012 D-Crit Conference

Wednesday, May 2, 12:30–7:00 p.m.
Visual Arts Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street
No charge for admission; Registration required
Follow @dcritconference on Twitter

The 2012 D-Crit Conference, featuring graduating students of the SVA MFA in Design Criticism, and moderated by Change Observer co-editor Julie Lasky, will take place on May 2, 2012 at the Visual Arts Theatre in New York City. This year’s conference is comprised of four themed panels, each introduced by keynote speakers, including media historian Stuart Ewen; Pentagram partner Michael Bierut; 2×4 founding partner Michael Rock; cultural historian Jeffrey Schnapp; and Interboro partner Daniel D’Oca. Topics to be addressed include the absence of firearms in design collections, the persistence of an anti-ornament bias in architectural discourse, Main Street USA as rhetorical trope, and the need for designers to make repairable products.

Register today and join D-Crit faculty, students, and guest speakers for a richly programmed afternoon of provocation, insight, and inspiration.

Eventually Everything: The 2012 D-Crit Conference Schedule
Wednesday, May 2, 12:30–7:00 p.m.

Opening remarks: D-Crit Chair Alice Twemlow and Conference Moderator Julie Lasky

Panel 1: Calculated Nostalgia
Keynote Speaker: Stuart Ewen
Anna Kealey, Unpacking the Pastoral Food Package: Myth-Making in Graphic Design
Ann Weiser, Main Street, USA and the Power of Myth
Katya Mezhibovskaya, Collection/Recollection: On the Place and Meaning of Nostalgia in Home Merchandising and the Domestic Interior

Panel 2: Working/Not Working
Keynote speaker: Daniel D’Oca
Derrick Mead, Designing for Repair: Things can be Fixed
Erin Routson, Towers to Town Homes: Public Housing, Policy, and Design in the US

Panel 3: Speaking Surfaces
Keynote speaker: Michael Bierut
Keynote speaker: Michael Rock
Cheryl Yau, Provocative Performances: A Close Reading of Figurative Typography
Julia van den Hout, Graphic Ornament in Interior Architecture

Panel 4: Man, Machine, Morality
Keynote speaker: Jeffrey Schnapp
Amna Siddiqui, Whiz Kids: Exploring New Definitions of Touch Through Intelligent Play
Tara Gupta, Honed/Toned: A Critique of Fitness Culture
Barbara Eldredge, Missing the Modern Gun: Object Ethics in Collections of Design

Last year’s conference featured a panel with Paola Antonelli, Linda Tischler, Olympia Kazi, Rob Walker, John Seabrook, and Bjarke Ingels. View videos of Present Tense: The 2011 D-Crit Conference here.

Moderator:

Julie Lasky is co-editor of Change Observer, a Web site devoted to design for social impact, supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in association with the Winterhouse Foundation. At D-Crit she teaches “Reporting on Design and Social Change” and will be a core faculty member of the SAVA Design Writing and Research Intensive, June 18–29.

Keynote speakers:

Michael Bierut is a partner in the international design consultancy Pentagram and a co-founder of the online design magazine Design Observer. A selection of his pithy essays has been collected under the title Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007). Michael has taught blogging at D-Crit and lectured on “Design, Writing, Teaching: Not my Real Job.”

Stuart Ewen is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies at Hunter College, and in the Ph.D. Programs in History, Sociology and American Studies at The CUNY Graduate Center. He helped define the field of Media Studies with books such as PR! A Social History of Spin (1996), All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (1987; 1999), and Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (1976).

Daniel D’Oca is Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Design School, Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory & Criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Principal and co-founder of Interboro Partners, a New York-based architecture, planning, and research firm. Daniel, who specializes in the politics of the contemporary built environment in America, has been a guest critic in Karrie Jacobs’ “Urban Curation” class and, with the other principals of Interboro, has lectured on “Advocacy and Pluralism in Architecture.”

Michael Rock is a founding partner and Creative Director at 2×4, and Director of the Graphic Architecture Project at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Michael, whose expertise spans graphic design and architecture, has lectured at D-Crit on “Superficiality: Dematerialization and Branded Surfaces.”

Jeffrey Schnapp is the faculty director of metaLAB at Harvard, a research and teaching collaborative dedicated to exploring networked culture in the arts and humanities. His most recent books are Speed Limits and The Electric Information Age Book (Princeton Architectural Press). Also forthcoming in 2012 is Digital_Humanities (MIT Press), a book co-written with Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, and Todd Presner.

Damon Rich, Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center

From designs for an experimental financial learning center in Queens to the first riverfront park in Newark, New Jersey, Damon Rich will share recent attempts to bring design and politics to productive crisis.

Damon Rich is the Urban Designer for the City of Newark, New Jersey where he leads design efforts with public and private actors to improve the city’s public spaces. In 1997, Rich founded the Center for Urban Pedagogy, and was its executive director for 10 years. His work has been used to represent the United States at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale, and has been exhibited at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Netherlands Architecture Institute.

The Spring 2012 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; Register online.

AfterParty at MoMA/P.S.1, 2009

MOS studio is an architectural practice that was born out of playful experimentation. But what does being experimental mean and how is this related to criticism? From its Greek kritikos, the ability to make judgments is vital in MOS’s deliberate practice. Michael Meredith, co-principal and co-founder of MOS, will talk about critical theory through his experience as an editor, critic, and educator and how this has shaped the way he sees the world of architecture and design.

Michael Meredith is an associate professor of architecture at Harvard and Princeton University. In 2003, he was a resident at the Atlantic Center for the Arts with the art critic Dave Hickey and, in 2000, he completed a residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Together with his partner, Hilary Sample, his firm MOS has designed furniture, products, sound, speculative architecture projects, artist collaborations such as the MoMA/P.S.1 AfterParty in 2009, and residences in New York, Ontario, Texas, and California.

The Spring 2012 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; Register here.

Cintra Wilson

Considered one of the 50 most influential people working in New York fashion, Cintra Wilson will discuss the process and thinking behind her forthcoming book, entitled Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling America’s Fashion Destiny (W.W. Norton and Company), which is a meditation on her belief that the American psyche manifests itself in what we wear.

Cintra Wilson is a culture critic and author, known for her highly effective, humorous, and irreverent popular culture and political commentary. She was a retail reviewer in The New York Times Fashion & Style section (Critical Shopper), and she currently writes a political column called C-Word, a column critiquing tabloid culture called The Dregulator, and contributes to Salon.com. Her books include A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations (Viking/Penguin 2000); Colors Insulting to Nature (Fourth Estate, 2004); and Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny (Bloomsbury, 2008).

The Spring 2012 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; Register online.

The Biography of a Building by Witold Rybczynski, Thames & Hudson, 2011

Witold Rybczynski will share the remarkable inside story of the planning, building, and use of the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, designed by Norman Foster in the mid 1970s for Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury’s private collection of paintings, drawings and sculptures. Rybczynski explores the nature of collecting and collections, the purpose and function of the art museum, the relationship between architect, client and sponsor, and the evolution and roots of late twentieth-century architecture.

Witold Rybczynski is Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. Born in Edinburgh, he studied architecture at McGill University in Montreal, where he also taught for twenty years. Of his many books, perhaps the most popular are Home, and A Clearing in the Distance (winner of the Anthony J. Lukas Prize).

Space is limited; Register here.

“Design the Life You Love,” a workshop led by Ayse Birsel
Saturday, March 17, 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

$250 Find registration and workshop details here.

On Saturday, March 17, D-Crit hosts an Academi of Life workshop led by Ayse Birsel, partner of  Birsel + Seck and designer of the Herman Miller Resolve office system and the M’Afrique collection for Moroso. In an all-day workshop Birsel will offer a design process, Deconstruction and Reconstruction™, as a creative tool to help you create the life you want to live. Using constructive metaphors, playful models and optimistic visualization, attendees will draw from concepts in fields as diverse as fashion, design, art, and gastronomy—looking to the work of thinkers like Issey Miyake, Ferran Adria, James Dyson and Steve Jobs—as food for thought.

Read about the workshop in a recent Huffington Post article by Linda Tischler, senior editor of Fast Company. Fulbright scholar and award-winning designer Birsel was recently interviewed on NY Brand Lab Radio, where she spoke about life, meaning and how to re-imagine your world and design the life you love.

10:00am         Introduction
10:30am         Class begins
12:30pm         Lunch
3:00pm           Class ends

Fulton Arcade, Fulton Street, Brooklyn 1972

Meredith TenHoor will present some of the markets, transportation networks and other infrastructures which made the mass consumption of designed goods possible in the 1960s and 70s. She will discuss how they were designed, what forms of consumption they enabled, and finally, how they have been appropriated and transformed for more sustainable uses today.

Meredith TenHoor’s research focuses on how architecture and urbanism participate in the distribution of natural resources. She is currently writing a history of architecture and biopolitics in Paris’s food markets. Other recent projects include a history of architects’ attempts to improve the food supply, “The Architect’s Farm”, in Above the Pavement, the Farm (edited by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, Princeton Architectural Press/Inventory Books, 2010), an exhibition and a book about Fulton Street Mall in Downtown Brooklyn, Street Value: Shopping, Planning and Politics on Fulton Mall, (co-written with Rosten Woo, Princeton Architectural Press/Inventory Books, 2010), a series of performances imagining everyday life in New Towns of the 1970s, and a series of lectures, dinners, and an architecture library at the Metropolitan Exchange in Downtown Brooklyn. TenHoor is a PhD candidate in the Architecture department at Princeton University.

The Spring 2012 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; Attendees must register here.

Jimenez Lai will speak about the alternate worlds depicted by his comics, physical installations, models, and small buildings. He’ll discuss the nature of his visual narratives and the ways in which they are fed by themes and issues such as representation, history, taste, theory, and storytelling.

Jimenez Lai is the founder of the Chicago-based architecture firm Bureau Spectacular. Previously he worked for MOS, AVL, REX, and OMA/Rem Koolhaas in New York, Rotterdam, and Toronto. Lai has exhibited “Point Clouds” at Chicago’s Extension Gallery and the exhibition “White Elephant” at Land of Tomorrow in Louisville KY. His monographic graphic novel / manifesto, Citizens of No Place, will be published by Princeton Architectural Press later this year with a grant from the Graham Foundation.

The Spring 2012 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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Starlee Kine will discuss how she converts her personal obsessions, of both the negative and positive variety, into universal themes—and how it’s impossible not to read the comments. She will also explain her process of getting orphaned ideas out of her head.

Starlee Kine is a radio producer, writer, and pop culture critic. A frequent contributor to PRI’s This American Life, CBC Radio’s WireTap, and New York Magazine’s Vulture blog, Kine has also written for The New York Times Magazine and the object-based periodical THE THING Quarterly. She is currently working on a book about the self-help industry titled, It IS Your Fault. Along with illustrator Arthur Jones she co-created the Post-It Note Reading Series.

The Spring 2012 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.