Wednesday / September 30, 2015 / 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Death and Afterlife of the Post-Industrial City
SAIC Ballroom, 112 South Michigan Avenue
A two-city symposium on the occasion of the inaugural Chicago Architectural Biennial presented by the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
If art and architecture over the past decade have been working through their increasingly global financing and field of operations, the national, local, and personal consequences of this shift have been but imperfectly charted. Given this unevenness in the debate about the future of our cultural institutions, it is striking to see initiatives like the Chicago Architectural Biennial play the global game against the grain, attracting attention to a city that is both the cradle of 19th-century industrialism in the Western Hemisphere and a refuge for "International Style" modernist architecture that was exiled from Europe in the era of fascism. The return of Chicago as a historical site and a biennial-circuit tourist destination allows us to ask a number of timely questions about the relations of architecture, politics, and the spaces we inhabit. We want not just to raise these questions, but also to suggest answers or at least avenues of research.
To that end, we opt for a binocular focus, staging panels both in Chicago during the biennial (at SAIC) and in New York shortly afterward at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Theorist-practitioners located in public art, architecture, urbanism, and the museum will address each other and the larger issues in a dialogic setting in public, with a written publication following in a leading architectural journal.
Panel 1 in Chicago: Death and Afterlife of the Post-Industrial City
The rhetoric of a post-industrial (and post-ideological) society is already a half-century old, but as phenomena like the Chicago Architecture Biennial show, the challenges of articulating narratives of growth and crisis in a metropolis that is no longer primarily a factory town have not declined in complexity. If anything, global networks of trade and tourism expose the limitations of the biologistic imagery of revival and decay, which relies implicitly on a theory of progress or of quasi-natural cycles. This panel invites experts in international modernism, urbanism and race theory, and historic preservation, some of whom themselves practitioners in urban space, to reflect on the realities and the fictions of the postindustrial metropolis as it turns outward.
Speakers:
-- Shiben Banerji, Assistant Professor, Art History, Theory, and Criticism, SAIC
-- Jorge Otero-Pailos, Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
-- Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, MoMA
-- Mabel Wilson, Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
-- Mechtild Widrich, Assistant Professor, Art History, Theory, and Criticism, SAIC
Panel 2 in New York City: Going Global? The Art-Education-Speculation Complex: November 18, 6pm, at the Museum of Modern Art.
