Monday, May 14,  2012,  7-9pm

 

Toward a New Cosmopolitanism was a Manifesto Series event with David Adjaye, Stan Allen, Anthony Appiah, Teresita Fernández, Enrique Walker and Sarah Whiting on the occasion of the release of Luis M. Mansilla + Emilio Tuñón – From Rules to Constraints edited by Giancarlo Valle and David Adjaye – Authoring: Re-placing Art and Architecture edited by Marc McQuade. Following the publication of The SANAA Studios Learning from Japan: Single Story Urbanism, (Edited by Florian Idenburg), these two books document the work and thinking developed in Princeton School of Architecture studios taught by David Adjaye and the Spanish Architects Mansilla + Tuñón from 2007 – 2011. Toward a New Cosmopolitism presented 6 manifestos on contemporary understandings of art and architecture emerging between global and local contexts.

 

About the books

Luis M. Mansilla + Emilio Tuñón – From Rules to Constraints

Edited by Giancarlo Valle

With contributions by Stan Allen, Enrique Walker, Sarah Whiting and Augustin Perez Rubio, photographs by Dean Kaufmann, Luis Asín, and Luis Baylón

 

From 2008 to 2010, Madrid based architects Luis M. Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón held the Jean Labatut Visiting Professorship at the Princeton School of Architecture. More than a collection of student work, From Rules to Constraints is a wide ranging reflection on teaching, design practice, history and the city. Focusing on three sites at three distinct scales, this book examines the constraints of the architectural project—social, political, historical, and environmental—in order to create new rules for working. Examining both their teaching methods and Mansilla + Tuñón’s own design work, the book presents the design process as an ongoing conversation between the building and the environment, between freedom and limits, and between the decided and undecided. In February of this year, as this book was nearing completion, Luis M. Mansilla passed away, making this one of the last records of his work and ideas. 

 

David Adjaye – Authoring: Re-placing Art and Architecture

Edited by Marc McQuade

With contributions by David Adjaye, Stan Allen, Alex Coles, Teresita Fernández, Dave Hickey, Sanford Kwinter, Jorge Pardo, and Matthew Ritchie

 

Authoring: Re-placing Art and Architecture challenges traditional assumptions about the relationship between art and architecture. From 2008 through 2010, David Adjaye and Marc McQuade, taught three studios at the Princeton School of Architecture. Each studio focused on a collaboration with three distinguished artists—Matthew Ritchie, Teresita Fernández, and Jorge Pardo—on interventions in three vastly different sites: the state of New Jersey, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, and the city of Mérida in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Through an exploratory process of questioning, developing, and testing, each architect and artist reexamines the expectations traditionally associated with the conventions of architectural design and representation. Authoring: Re-placing Art and Architecture presents recent projects from David Adjaye, Matthew Ritchie, Teresita Fernández, and Jorge Pardo, along with interviews, essays, and archival material that explore the shared space of art and architecture.

 

About the Participants


Stan Allen is an architect working in New York and dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University.  He holds degrees from Brown University, The Cooper Union and Princeton. He has taught at Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, and his architectural firm SAA/Stan Allen Architect has realized buildings and urban projects in the United States, South America and Asia. In 2008, he received a P/A Award for the Taichung Gateway Park and a Faith and Form Award for the CCV Chapel; In 2009 he received a P/A Award for the Yan-Ping Waterfront in Taipei, an AIA Award for the CCV Chapel, the John Q. Hejduk Award, and an Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2010, his building for Paju Book City in Korea received an AIA Award.  In 2011, the Taichung InfoBox was recognized with a P/A Award, and AIA Awards from New York City, New York State and the Tri-State Region.  In addition to numerous articles and project reviews, his architectural work is published in Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City, (Princeton Architectural Press 2001) and his essays in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation (Routledge, 2008).  His most recent book is the edited volume Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain, (with Marc McQuade) Published by Lars M ü ller in 2011.

 

David Adjaye is founder and Principal Architect of Adjaye Associates. E stablished in June 2000, the firm has received worldwide attention, with work ranging in scale from private houses, cafes and bars, exhibitions and temporary pavilions to major arts centres, civic buildings and masterplans in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. The practice is currently engaged on the prestigious commission to design the Smithsonian Institution’s ambitious National Museum of African American History and Culture on a prominent site on the National Mall in Washington D.C. Adjaye’s belief in working together with artists and other cultural thinkers has led to a number of notable collaborations on both building projects as well as exhibitions. The practice established its early reputation with a series of private houses where the artist was client, and this dialogue continues with recent public buildings, exhibitions and research projects, including Chris Offili’s “The Upper Room” exhibited (1999-2002 and 2010), which is now in the permanent collection of Tate Britain. David Adjaye’s photographic survey of 52 cities across the continent of Africa, “Urban Africa”, exhibited at the Design Museum London (2010), has shifted the understanding of Africa’s metropolitan centres while offering a global resonance and consolidating the African heritage that informs the practice’s work. He was awarded the OBE for services to architecture in 2007 and received the Design Miami/ Year of the Artist title in 2011.


Anthony Appiah is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Appiah has published widely about ethics, African and black cultural studies, racial identity, political theory and philosophy of the mind and is the author of several novels, including “Avenging Angel,” “Nobody Likes Letitia” and “Another Death in Venice.” He also authored “Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers” in 2006, which explores how individuals in a rapidly globalized world must balance the demands of cultural identity and shared humanity.

 

Teresita Fernández is a conceptual artist best known for experiential, large-scale work inspired by landscape and natural phenomena. She is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award, an American Academy in Rome Affiliated Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant. In 2011, President Obama appointed Fernández to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.

 

Enrique Walker is an associate professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, where he is Director of the Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design Program. He is also an associate professor at the Pratt Institute and a visiting professor at the Barcelona Institute of Architecture. Walker’s published work includes 12 Interviews, Tschumi on Architecture: Conversations with Enrique Walker , and most recently, Lo Ordinario.

 

Sarah Whiting possesses an indefatigable curiosity about how individuals constitute a public and, more specifically, through what forms (architecture and urbanism) that public manifests itself and is, in turn, formed. Whiting is Dean of the School of Architecture at Rice University, an architectural think tank that combines a platform for projective practices with research into architecture’s collective subject. In her writing, her teaching, and her practice, Whiting focuses on architecture’s public audience and how architecture can engage that collective subject through program, form, and technology. Whiting co-founded WW with her partner, Ron Witte, in 1999. She obtained her B.A. from Yale University, her M.Arch. from Princeton, and her Ph.D. from MIT.




The event was made possible with the support of Lars Müller and Princeton School of Architecture.