NEW YORK, February 3, 2016 – Van Alen Institute, The Atlantic, and CityLab today launched Van Alen Sessions, an online short-documentary series highlighting current debates about urban infrastructure. Watch Episode One here.
Produced with talented short-documentary film directors and graduate student researchers, and funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, AkzoNobel, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Van Alen Sessions takes viewers on revealing trips through a city’s internal workings, documenting conversations with urban planning practitioners and city dwellers. The series brings together the analysis of experts and the experiences of ordinary people.
The first season of the series, “Tunnel Vision,” directed by Kelly Loudenberg, leads viewers through massive tunnel transportation infrastructure projects. With behind-the-scenes research provided by graduate students in design and public policy, this focus serves as a lens for understanding how large-scale interventions impact the way we move in, around, and between cities every day. The three episodes illustrate what it takes to create the transit networks that shape our routines and relationships in cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle.
“Cities are amazingly complex systems. Understanding them better not only requires the knowledge of influential experts, but also that of regular citizens,” said David van der Leer, Van Alen Institute’s Executive Director. “In Van Alen Sessions we’ve woven together those voices—the academic, the professional, the person on the street—to further uncover the impact the urban environment has on daily life.”
“The online short-form documentary format of Van Alen Sessions humanizes monumental design projects and makes complex policy measures immediately relevant,” said Kelly Loudenberg, whose work has screened at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the BMW Guggenheim Lab, and the Architecture and Design Film Festival. “This project embodies the bold possibilities of journalism today and puts 21st-century feats of design on full display.”
“We’re thrilled to launch Van Alen Sessions,” said Stephen Cassell, Van Alen Institute board chair and principal at Architecture Research Office. “This engaging series brings together experts from many disciplines to analyze some of the biggest issues cities face today.”
Following the release of all three episodes on theatlantic.com, citylab.com, and vanalen.org, Van Alen Institute will host a celebration and screening of the first season at their Flatiron programming hub at 30 West 22nd Street on Feb. 17 at 7 p.m. The issues raised in the videos will be explored further in articles by student journalists on Van Alen’s blog, Stories. Season Two of Van Alen Sessions will be released in conjunction with Van Alen’s public program festival in June 2016.
About Season One:
Episode One, released today, illustrates the $20 billion Gateway Project, a high-speed rail corridor designed to alleviate the bottleneck along the Northeast Corridor. The video offers new vantage points into ongoing tunnel construction, offset with first-hand accounts from New Jersey Transit and Amtrak commuters. Interviews with Petra Messick (Amtrak) and Tom Wright (Regional Plan Association) provide insight into the current transportation crisis’ roots in outdated infrastructure and the deterioration caused by Hurricane Sandy.
Episode Two, to be released on February 10, offers backstage access to the technology lab working on a prototype for Hyperloop, a $6 billion high-speed transportation system connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco. Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for The Los Angeles Times, frames the project within the larger context of high-speed rail initiatives in California and the debate surrounding private versus public investment in infrastructure.
Episode Three, to be released on February 17, brings viewers deep inside Seattle’s new U Link rail stations before they open in March 2016. In-transit Seattleites provide commentary about this 20-years-in-the-making event, while Andy Mencke, the technical engineer managing the tunnel boring project, and Hannah McIntosh, strategic advisor at the Seattle Department of Transportation, explain in clear terms how Seattle is not just a center for information technology, but infrastructure innovation as well.
Van Alen Institute has a longstanding interest in rail infrastructure, including their involvement in the 2009 Life at the Speed of Rail competition in collaboration with the Obama administration. Petra Messick and Christopher Hawthorne, interviewees in Van Alen Sessions, served as jury members for the competition, which thrust designers’ ideas into a national discussion that had previously been dominated solely by politics, and generated dozens of ideas for how to build this new infrastructure.
About Van Alen Institute
At Van Alen Institute, we believe design can transform cities, landscapes, and regions to improve people’s lives. We collaborate with communities, scholars, policymakers, and professionals on local and global initiatives that rigorously investigate the most pressing social, cultural, and ecological challenges of tomorrow. Building on more than a century of experience, we develop cross-disciplinary research, provocative public programs, and inventive design competitions.
Recent and current projects include Ecologies of Addiction, an interdisciplinary research initiative with Imperial College London’s Sustainable Society Network (SSN+) into the complex relationship between addictive behaviors and the physical environment of the city; Future Ground, an interdisciplinary design and policy competition to develop long-term strategies for vacant land reuse in New Orleans; and Changing Course, an interdisciplinary design competition offering 100-year visions for restoring and sustaining the Mississippi River Delta for the people and industries that call it home. Learn more about Van Alen Institute at past.vanalen.org.
About Season Director / Producer
Kelly Loudenberg is an artist and journalist based in Los Angeles. Her short-form documentaries non-dogmatically explore and illuminate the pursuits of mavericks, visionaries, and seekers who are engaged in reconfiguring urban and rural spaces in unexpected ways and bringing the utopian to the practical through radical reconsiderations of the built environment. Her work has screened at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the BMW Guggenheim Lab, and the Architecture and Design Film Festival. In 2010, she completed a residency at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, Utah. She was a research fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art in 2012. She has created work for National Geographic, New Yorker, The New York Times, and Vice.
