On Tuesday, August 15, join Van Alen Book Club as we continue to explore the planet’s changing climate with a discussion of Rachel Carson’s landmark Silent Spring, which is widely credited for launching environmental movements worldwide. When it was published in 1962, the book’s combination of rigorous science and lyrical language captured the public imagination and sparked widespread debate and concern about the indiscriminate use of pesticides and impact of technological innovation on ecosystems.
Registration is open to new and former participants of Van Alen Book Club, and dinner and drinks will be provided.
Please note, this event has been rescheduled from our usual meeting on the second Tuesday of each month to August 15.
Moderator
Denise Hoffman Brandt is the Director of Landscape Architecture and an Associate Professor at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York, and Principal of Hoffman Brandt Projects, LLC. Her work focuses on landscape as ecological infrastructure—the social, cultural and environmental systems that generate urban form and sustain urban life. Her recent book, Waterproofing New York, co-edited with Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, examines climate-adaptive design from the vantage point of infrastructural systems, and City Sink, published in 2012, re-conceived urban plant/soil systems as infrastructure for carbon storage. Among other recent awards, Hoffman Brandt has received the 2009 New York Prize Fellowship from Van Alen Institute and a 2010 EDRA/Metropolis Great Places Research award. Her planning proposal for resituating refugee relief planning as an urban construct received honorable mention in the Architectural Association’s Environmental Tectonics Competition and was featured in an international workshop on the right to landscape and will be included in the forthcoming publication.