GLOBAL Design NYU: Elsewhere Envisioned

June 1, 2011 at 1:41 pm Leave a comment

For the first time in its history, NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study gathers leading-edge architects, designers, and theorists to address design issues that affect global ecology and the environment.

This exhibit of architectural models, drawings, animations, and projections, combined with a two-day symposium, brings together designers, scholars, and innovators to showcase design research as it relates to visionary architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, and ecological planning.

Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is “as close to the beyond as to things near” when we evoke “our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere.”

GLOBAL DESIGN | ELSEWHERE ENVISIONED is directed and curated by Gallatin professors Peder Anker, Louise Harpman, Mitchell Joachim with support from the Gallatin Design Collective.

Sponsors include Susanne Wofford, Dean of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU Office of the Provost, Global Research Initiatives Program; NYU Office of Sustainability; Gallatin Community Learning Initiative; NYU Environmental Studies Department.

http://www.gdnyu.com/
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