A busy slate of programming ahead for the Spitzer School of Architecture, including "Design Matters."
It’s a busier than usual fall for The City College of New York’s Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture. Exhibitions, colloquia, symposiums and a myriad of public events set the stage for the industrious beginning to the academic year, including "Design Matters: In Favor of Public Urban Space," an exhibition and event series celebrating 25 years of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona’s (CCCB) European Prize for Urban Public Space, a biennial competition that recognizes public space projects.
The U.S. premiere of the exhibition opens Thursday, Sept. 10.
Reimagining the Archive: Black Memory as Design Praxis, a symposium hosted by Place, Memory & Culture Incubator (PMCI), explores how Afro-diasporic memory and cultural practices are reshaping architecture, preservation, and the built environment, takes place Sept. 17-19.
The Lewis Mumford Lecture: “From Crisis to Proximity: A New Social Congract for Cities” featuring Carlos Moreno on Tuesday, Sept. 22 at 6 p.m.
Spitzer Professor and Dark Matter U (DMU) co-founder Jerome Haferd’s first major U.S. exhibition of the DMU network "Dark Matter U: Justice, Pedagogy, Design," opens Thursday, Oct. 1 at the Center for Architecture.
The opening reception of “Design Matters” takes place Thursday, Sept. 10 at 6 p.m. with a "Colloquium: Why Design Matters? In Favor of Urban Public Space" at 4 p.m.
CCNY Provost Tony Liss, Spitzer School Dean Marta Gutman and Judit Carrera, director of the CCCB will open the exhibition. Pilar Soldevila i García, CCCB executive director, Mario Corea Delepianne, Infrastructures and Technical Production Section, and Elisabet Goula Sardà, Debates Service, will also attend.
CCNY’s Professor Fabian Llonch will open the Colloquium, with Professor Julio Salcedo-Fernandez, CCNY’s director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design, moderating, and with panelists Maria Buhigas, chief architect of the City of Barcelona, Josep Ricart, principal, Harquitectes, and Mimi Hoang, architect and principal, nARCHITECTS, New York.
The exhibition runs through February 26 and documents a quarter-century of urban public space design based on the premise that design shapes the conditions of everyday life in cities, as a critical form of inquiry that engages questions of equity, governance, ecology, and collective well-being. Ten themes offer a juxtaposition to design, such as Memory: Overlapping Times; Mobility: Sharing Movement and Hybrids; and Fostering Complexity.
Other “Design Matters” events include:
"Colloquium: Why Care Matters" on Thursday, Oct. 8 at 2 p.m. with an introduction by architect, historian and Spitzer School’s Adjunct Assistant Professor Marina Correia, Gutman moderating, and panelists Zaida Muxi, architect, city planner, Distinguished Professor in Architecture for the School of Architecture, Art and Design, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, Sasha Topolnytska, architect, adjunct lecturer, Spitzer School of Architecture, and Annya Ramirez-Jimenez, AIA, partner, Marvel Designs; and
"Colloquium: Why Housing Matters" on Thursday, Nov. 5 at 2 p.m. with an introduction by Spitzer School’s Adjunct Associate Professor Kaja Kuehl, moderator Spitzer School’s Assistant Professor Laura Wainer and panelists Jing Liu, architect and principal, SO-IL, New York and Cassim Shepard, distinguished lecturer from the Spitzer School of Architecture.
All events are free and open to the public. Please RSVP via Eventbite.
Taking place concurrently is the symposium "Reimagining the Archive: Black Memory as Design Praxis" on Sept. 17-19. The symposium, hosted by Place, Memory & Culture Incubator, explores how Afro-diasporic memory and cultural practices are reshaping architecture, preservation, and the built environment.
The three-day event includes a keynote, opening and closing receptions, a Harlem walking tour, open house and performances, and a full-day symposium. The symposium marks a milestone moment, including the transition of the Harlem Place, Memory & Culture Archive to community partners.
Founded three years ago, the PMCI is a collaborative initiative that rethinks preservation as an active, creative, and community-driven process. Visit this link for more information and to register.
Mumford Lecturer Carlos Moreno is a Sorbonne University professor, scientist and writer. Moreno is associate professor and scientific director of the ETI (Entrepreneurship – Territory – Innovation) Chair at the IAE Paris, the Sorbonne Business School. The French-Colombian scholar coined the term “15-Minute City,” which offered a deceptively simple and revolutionary idea that everyday destinations like schools, stores, and offices should only be a short walk or bike ride away from home. In 2024, Moreno wrote the book The 15-minute City: A Solution for Saving Our Time and Our Planet. In his lecture on September 22, Moreno will argue for a new social contract in which proximity is a structural response to crises shaping urban futures.
The Mumford Lecture will be held in CCNY’s Shepard Hall at 160 Convent Avenue. The lecture is free and open to the public.
“Dark Matter U: Justice, Pedagogy, Design,” at the Center for Architecture, is curated in three parts: recording past DMU work, documenting current DMU efforts and a provocation for the future of DMU. It runs from October 1 through March 27, 2027. The exhibition is free but a ticket is required for the opening.
Initiated in the wake of the 2020 movement for Black Lives to enact systemic change across the design fields, Dark Matter U emerged as the first BIPOC-led transdisciplinary network in the built environment. DMU has grown into an enduring voice in the built environment milieu, modeling a new counter-institutional framework by which design pedagogy, education, and generative creative output can be conceived and produced. The exhibition is curated and produced by Haferd and DMU network members Venesa Alicea-Chuqui and Sophie Weston Chien.
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Thea Klapwald
e:
tklapwald@ccny.cuny.edu