Workshops, Performances, Conversations Exploring Urban Well-Being Run May 9 to 19;
Season Concludes with Institute’s Spring Party Celebrating 120-Year Legacy
NEW YORK, April 15, 2014—Van Alen Institute, an organization dedicated to advancing innovation in architecture and urban design, today announced its Spring 2014 Events series running from May 9 to May 19 in New York City.
This eleven-day slate of workshops, films, tours, performances, conversations, tech demonstrations, and more invites the public to explore the effects of urban life on the mind and body, and join in conversation about how the design of cities can enhance well-being.
Featuring acclaimed artists, musicians, and design practitioners along with experts in sociology, psychology, and technology, the roster includes an evening performance featuring designer Vito Acconci and artist Martha Rosler; a hands-on construction workshop on emerging public spaces; and a mobile electroencephalography (EEG) walk exploring the brain’s response to the built environment, among other participatory events.
“In recent years we hear the word well-being more and more, but what is it really? This diverse collection of spring events offers a chance to ask questions about the complex relationship between our cities and ourselves,” said Van Alen Institute Executive Director David van der Leer. “We are excited to delve into critical conversation, reflections and interactions about our urban environments and the well-being of city dwellers.”
Van Alen Spring 2014 Events continue the Institute’s multi-year initiative Elsewhere: Escape and the Urban Landscape, a series of competitions, public programs, and research that investigates how and why we escape from urban life. Examining both physical and psychological themes, the Institute’s spring season asks questions about how we experience and perceive the city, considering how escape can contribute to urban well-being.
The spring series kicks off with a celebratory evening at Brooklyn art and performance venue ISSUE Project Room offering a fast-paced medley of performers, designers, artists, and more. The series concludes with the Van Alen Institute Spring Party on Wednesday, May 21 at the High Line Hotel, celebrating the Institute’s 120-year legacy and looking toward the organization’s future. Acclaimed Australian electro-pop artist White Prism will perform.
Information and tickets are now available online at past.vanalen.org/elsewhere. Tickets for most events are $7, with complimentary admission for Van Alen members.
Program collaborators for the spring series include: ISSUE Project Room, Cloud Lab at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and Times Square Arts.
The Spring 2014 Events schedule is below and images are available at: http://bit.ly/1hD4o1T
ABOUT VAN ALEN INSTITUTE
Since its founding in 1894, Van Alen Institute has promoted innovative thinking about the role of architecture and design in civic life. Today the Institute’s competitions, research, and public programs shape the public conversation and bring design excellence to the built environment of cities and sites around the world. Van Alen’s widely influential legacy of competitions includes Public Property: An Ideas Competition for Governors Island (1996), which kicked off an international conversation about Governors Island and its redevelopment as a public resource, and TKTS2K: A Competition to Design a New York Icon (1999), which led to the TKTS booth in Times Square and reactivated the public space at the busiest pedestrian intersection in New York City. Current projects include Rebuild by Design, a collaboration catalyzing innovative ideas to build community resilience across coastal New York and New Jersey, and Changing Course, a competition to envision a more sustainable Mississippi River Delta. Learn more about Van Alen Institute at past.vanalen.org.
SPRING 2014 EVENT SCHEDULE
The Imprint of the City
Van Alen Spring 2014 Events Launch
Friday, May 9
7:30 – 9 p.m., doors 7:00 p.m.
ISSUE Project Room, 22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn
Tickets: $7
How does the physical and sensory richness of the city shape who we are—for worse or for better?
To launch Van Alen Institute’s Spring 2014 Events, the Institute and ISSUE Project Room present a fast-paced medley of music, poetry, personal reflections, conversations, and performances by designers, artists, musicians, writers, social scientists, and others exploring the meaning of well-being, and the effects of the city on our minds and bodies.
Doors at 7:00 pm. The celebration continues with drinks following the program.
Contributions by: Vito Acconci, designer; Diana Balmori, Landscape and Urban Designer; Kai-Uwe Bergmann, Partner, Business Development at BIG; Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University; Ariane Lourie Harrison, principal of Harrison Atelier and a critic and lecturer at the Yale School of Architecture; Seth Harrison, principal of Harrison Atelier and founder of Apple Tree Partners; media artist Brian House; poet Rachel Levitsky; artist, designer and founder of The Center for Urban Pedagogy Damon Rich; artist Martha Rosler; Associate Professor of Architectural History and Theory at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture, Meredith Tenhoor; modular synthesizer artist Ben Vida; and musician C. Spencer Yeh.
Event Partner: Issue Project Room
Thank you to our sponsor: Lagunitas Brewing Co.
Emerging Public Spaces
Construction Workshop and Conversation
Saturday, May 10 Workshop 2:00 – 5:00 p.m., Conversation 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Albee Square, Corner of Fulton Street and Bond Street, Brooklyn
Free
As neglected, underutilized urban sites are reactivated as spaces for public use, how can we retain the playful, experimental, unscripted, and the open-ended?
Van Alen and Public Workshop, an organization that creates engaging opportunities for youth and their communities to shape the design of their cities, invite you to join us for an outdoor, hands-on construction workshop in Albee Square in Downtown Brooklyn, where we’ll work together and build a pop-up pavilion in the pedestrian plaza. Following the workshop, we’ll convene in the collaboratively constructed space to discuss how as city-dwellers we use—and define the use of—public space.
Conversation participants: Daniel Campo, Associate Professor, School of Architecture and Planning, Morgan State University and author of The Accidental Playground; Wendy Feuer, Assistant Commissioner Design, Art & Wayfinding, NYC DOT; Leslie Koch, President of the Trust for Governors Island; Alex Gilliam, founder of Public Workshop.
Workshop 2:00 – 5:00 p.m., Conversation 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Event partners: Public Workshop and Downtown Brooklyn Partnership With thanks to Robert Silman Associates, Structural Engineers.
How Does the Brain Respond to the City?
Tech Demo and Conversation
Tuesday, May 13
7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
ISSUE Project Room, 22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn
Tickets: $7
What grabs our attention in the congested city?
The latest research in neuroscience is revealing fascinating things about human perception and the relationship between what we see and what we experience. And with inexpensive but high-powered tools such as electroencephalography-based (EEG) brain-computer interfaces (BCI) now increasingly accessible, it’s getting easier to tap into the signals underlying attention, stress, and our processing of the world.
Join Van Alen Institute and Columbia University GSAPP Cloud Lab for an interactive tech demo of BCI research projects, followed by a dialogue among designers, technologists, biomedical engineers, neuroscientists, and environmental psychologists exploring what brain data tells us about our experience of the city. Can new technologies deepen our understanding of how people relate to place and improve how we design cities?
In advance of this event, we invite you to join us with Cloud Lab on Sunday, April 27 to experience brain-computer interface technology for yourself. This research workshop will use mobile EEG technology to record the brain’s response as we explore Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood. Register here for the April 27 research workshopà
Your brainwave data will be aggregated into a spectacular visualization produced by Cloud Lab and presented on May 13. Other project demos will include OpenBCI, a low-cost, programmable, open-source EEG platform; and MindRider, a bike helmet that translates EEG feedback into an embedded LED display. Drinks will be served after the conversation.
Conversation participants: Mark Collins, Director, Cloud Lab, Columbia University’s GSAPP; Josue Diaz, Designer, MindRider; Arlene Ducao, Chief, MindRider; Toru Hasegawa, Director, Cloud Lab; Dave Jangraw, Neuroscientist and Biomedical Engineer, Columbia University; Ilias Koen, Builder and Artist, MindRider; Joel Murphy, Co-Founder & President, OpenBCI; Conor Russomanno, Co-Founder & CEO, OpenBCI; Nancy Wells, Associate Professor at the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis, College of Human Ecology, Cornell University. Thank you to our sponsor: Lagunitas Brewing Co.
What Is Well-Being, Really?
Roundtable Discussion
Wednesday, May 14
7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
ISSUE Project Room, 22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn
Tickets: $7
The discussion of well-being is growing stronger across fields such as design, policy, business, and the sciences, but are we all talking about the same thing? With competing definitions, rubrics, and objective and subjective markers to measure well-being, how can we build a shared conversation about what it means to enhance the quality of urban life?
Join us for a multidisciplinary exchange assembling a range of voices—including architects and planners, public health experts, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers and technologists—to interrogate the idea of well-being together. Drinks will be served after the conversation.
Conversation participants: Robert Richardson, Senior Director of Strategy, Control Group and Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Pratt Institute; Susan Saegert, Professor of Environmental Psychology, CUNY Graduate Center; Beth C. Weitzman, Vice Dean and Professor of Health and Public Policy, NYU Steinhardt; Claire Weisz, founding principal of WXY architecture + urban design; Sharon Zukin, Professor of Sociology, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Thank you to our sponsor: Lagunitas Brewing Co.
Urban Mindfulness
Walking Tour
Saturday, May 17
1:00 – 2:00 p.m. and 2:30 – 3:30 p.m.
Meet at Van Alen Institute, 30 West 22nd Street
Tickets: $7
The technique of “mindfulness” is on the rise via an industry self-help manuals, mobile apps, and private classes—but is it substance or fluff? Originally rooted in eastern religion, mindfulness has been popularized as a remedy for everything from anxiety and stress to overstimulation and lack of focus. Could “urban mindfulness” be a meaningful tool for harried city-dwellers?
Join us for a workshop and walking tour with Dr. Jonathan S. Kaplan, clinical psychologist and author of Urban Mindfulness: Cultivating Peace, Presence, and Purpose in the Middle of It All, where we’ll get a taste of what it really means to apply the technique of mindfulness to everyday experiences in the city, and see for ourselves if it can focus our attention and heighten our awareness of the urban environment around us. Tours will depart from Van Alen Institute, 30 West 22nd Street. Please wear comfortable shoes.
Embodied Architecture
Yoga Session
Sunday, May 18
3:00 – 4:00 p.m.
ISSUE Project Room, 22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn
Tickets: $7
You may be familiar with practices such as yoga and meditation, but have you thought about their potential to expand our thinking about how we design and inhabit space?
This guided session led by Richard Allon, yoga and meditation instructor and principal of Richard Allon Architect & Associates, will work with the body, mind, breath, and space to cultivate awareness of both the internal landscape of the body and the shared urban environment. Dress comfortably and bring your yoga mat!
Outside In
Film Screening and Discussion
Monday, May 19
7:00 – 9:30 p.m.
The Duke on 42nd Street, 229 West 42nd Street
Free
What qualities of a place shape us, consciously and unconsciously?
This film screening, presented with Times Square Arts, draws on a range of cinematic approaches to examine the links between environment, sensory experience, and well-being. The selected films take us on a journey through varied urban landscapes—from the density of Times Square to the sublime views of San Francisco, from digital mines in contemporary Ghana to the instant cities of contemporary China—offering poignant observations on the visual and sonic stimuli around us.
The screening will be followed by a discussion with Paul Dallas, writer and curator; Jeff Risom, Partner, Head of Gehl Institute at Gehl Architects; Sukhdev Sandhu, Associate Professor of English, Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University; and Mabel Wilson, Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University’s GSAPP.
Doors at 6:30 p.m. Drinks will be served prior to the screening.
Films:
- 45 7 Broadway (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2013, 5 min): A mini city symphony that provides a visual analogue to the sensory overload of contemporary Times Square.
- A Cinematic Study of Fog in San Francisco (Andy Black and Sam Green, 2013, 13 min): A whimsical study of one of San Francisco’s defining features is an existential inquiry into the ways natural phenomena dramatically affect mood and our sense of place.
- Lettres du Voyant (Louis Henderson, 2013, 40 min): This documentary-fiction hybrid set in contemporary Ghana traverses the mining of underground mineral deposits and mining of data from electronic waste to uncover hidden geographies across post-colonial, digital, and urban space.
- The Human Scale (Andreas Dalsgaard, 2012, 56 min): Visiting cities in Europe, Asia, and the United States, this wide-ranging documentary explores the influential ideas of Danish architect and planner Jan Gehl, known for his study of human behavior in cities, to consider how design can account for our perception of scale and its profound influence on individual and collective well-being.
Curated by Paul Dallas
Event Partner: Times Square Arts
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