Search results for ""Author Gretchen Wilkins""

Guest-edited by Gretchen Wilkins The renowned Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit, Michigan, has been described as the epicentre of American Modernism. When it opened in 1932 it combined a stunning Eliel Saarinen-designed campus with a radically open educational philosophy to attract and produce some of the most influential artists, designers and architects in US history, including Charles and Ray Eames, Fumihiko Maki, Florence Knoll and Edmund Bacon. Often compared to other experimental schools such as the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and Taliesin, Cranbrook’s sustained purpose has been advancing a wide, interdisciplinary latitude and self-directed design research to expand and diversify its approaches to architectural practice. There is a deep and persistent idea that open and experimental acts of making should define pedagogy, and by extension that education should shape practice, not the other way around. Cranbrook’s rigorous defiance of dogma and loose grip on the disciplines enables an educational model that combines the practices of art, design, making and urbanism. In this issue, alumni, faculty and scholars reflect on Cranbrook’s model in light of contemporary and challenging questions in architectural education, practice and the profession. Contributors: Kevin Adkisson, Emily Baker, Peggy Deamer, Pia Ednie-Brown, Ronit Eisenbach, Dan Hoffman, Yu-Chih Hsiao, Peter Lynch, Bill Massie, Hani Rashid, Jesse Reiser, Lois Weinthal, and Tod Williams. Featured architects: Asymptote Architecture, Building Culture PLA, Reiser+Umemoto (RUR), Studio Libeskind, and Tod Williams Billie Tsien.

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What form of housing will emerge in Dubai, where the majority of the population are non-citizens and the average length of stay is three days? How will depopulating cities reclaim vacant space, reorganize infrastructure and redefine their economic identity? What type of architecture results from the prevalence of airborne contaminants? What kind of urbanism does Google Earth produce? Exploring the increasingly decentralized systems through which cities are organized and produced, Distributed Urbanism highlights the architectural practices that are emerging in response. Unlike early models of urbanism, in which centralized models of production, communication and governance were sited within a central business district, contemporary urbanism is shaped by remote, distributed mechanisms such as information technologies, (i.e. SatNav, Google Earth, E-trade, Photosynth or RSS web feeds) cooperative economic models and environmental networks, many of which are physically remote from the cities they shape. Consisting of a collection of case studies on global cities including Rotterdam, Tokyo, Barcelona, Detroit, Hong Kong, Dubai, Beijing and Mumbai, Distributed Urbanism draws on these cities in relation to current events, urban schemes and demographic data. All the contributors, a combination of commentators on urbanism and architecture, as well as practitioners in the field, are admired for their work in the area of urban change.

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