Category: BLDGBLOG

Before his talk last week at Postopolis! LA, Matthew Coolidge, director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, joked that someday he should bring a laser pointer up there to the roof deck and give a new lecture, pointing out specific offices visible around us in the nighttime sky.
That afterhours galaxy of Xerox machines and elevator shafts, paper-covered desks and meeting halls, would all be explained, room by room, from the artificially grassed crown of the Standard Hotel.
And though both of us laughed, I think it’s an amazing idea.

[Image: The view from Postopolis! LA; photo by Dan Hill].

Standing up there in the darkness, looking at bank towers and real estate investment firms, individual offices lit from within (and even whole hallways, stretching horizontally into the sky before disappearing into themselves through a trick of perspective), the 16th, 17th, and much-higher stories of the city all visible to us like an architectural section, you could narrate a kind of local micro-history of nighttime spaces in LA.
It wouldn’t be giving a lecture so much as becoming a planetarium.
“In that building over there,” Coolidge might say, pointing his laser at a window four blocks distant, “the man who invented Technicolor once worked; and in that office over there” – pointing yet further, to One Wilshire, visible from the pool side of the building – “the internet traffic through which you’re able to write this post passes everyday.”
And so on.
The woman who first dreamt up and mapped the flight paths of intercontinental passenger airplanes over LAX once ran a property law services firm in that office, just barely visible with a laser pointer down there.

[Images: The artificial astronomy of downtown Los Angeles, as seen during Postopolis! LA; photographed by Dan Hill].

Or perhaps it could be a new form of immersive storytelling: local novelists stop by every third Friday of the summer months and, in the darkness, using laser pointers, they invent family dramas, murder mysteries, political thrillers, and end-of-the-world catastrophes, all the while pointing to specific rooms and halls within which the action takes place – even the specific computer monitor, visible in someone’s unblinded window, where plot-defining government secrets are thought to be stored…
Alternative fictions of the city.
In a way, I’m reminded of the brilliant Access Restricted program, curated by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (the final edition of which is April 28). Access Restricted is a “free nomadic lecture series that opens rarely visited and often prohibited spaces in Lower Manhattan to the general public” – meaning that certain offices, lobbies, meeting rooms, and even whole buildings directly relevant to the lecture taking place inside them are temporarily opened up for public visitation.
But imagine a rooftop version to this, a kind of Rooftops Restricted: you take a roof somewhere in midtown Manhattan and you give it to Paul Auster for the night, with a microphone in one hand and a laser pointer in the other, with 10 or 15 people camped out in sweaters all around him.
Next week, it’s Jonathan Lethem; the week after that, Joseph O’Neill.
You generate a new ad hoc literature for the city, a narrative planetarium that radiates stories outward from the rooftops into the city.

Starting just a few hours from now down at SCI-Arc, on a cloudless 73º day, “seven distinguished architects and theorists” whose designs straddle “the intersection of physical and virtual worlds” will be presenting their work at the Mediascapes Symposium, led by Ed Keller.

The bulk of the afternoon’s discussion will encompass “the practice of immersive and virtual architecture, which spans animation and 3D technologies, digital environments, and questions of materiality… asking how these classifications will define our understanding of the relationships between tangible and intangible worlds.”
One of today’s speakers, Benjamin Bratton, who will also be presenting next week at Postopolis! LA, describes his talk: “Pervasive computing will make inanimate objects see, hear, and comment on our interactions with them. This experience will, in many cases, be indistinguishable from a psychotic break, or from the rituals of classical Animism.” That, or it will feel like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
If you’re in LA, be sure to stop by.

[Image: A rendering of a “media facade” in action, in Melbourne’s Federation Square; image via Swissnex].

Tonight at 6:30pm here in San Francisco, the fantastic local gallery Swissnex is hosting an event called Media Facades and Newscocoons, “featuring three guests from Switzerland and a Bay Area counterpart.”
The participants are:

—Barbara Kummler, a Swiss media specialist with ag4, a “mediatecture company” based in Köln, Germany
—media artist Muriel Waldvogel
—Jeffrey Huang, Director of the Media and Design Laboratory at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland
—Patrick Keller of fabric | ch (and speaker at next week’s Postopolis! LA)
—Scott Minneman, interdisciplinary designer and co-founder of Onomy Labs

At the same time, Swissnex will be kicking off an exhibition of Newscocoons designed by Waldvogel and Huang. The Newscocoons are “room-compatible media art pieces of inflatable ‘media furniture’ that mirror the topics discussed in a subtle but powerful manner.” Waldvogel and Huang have also developed the amazing Sentient Ecologies project, “an algorithmically generated housing structure that follows phototropic behaviors of plants and produces instead of consumes energy.”
After their presentations, BLDGBLOG will be on hand to moderate a 40-minute roundtable discussion about the implications and future applications of their work.
Here is a map. You are meant to email before attending; if you want to stop by – and please do, as I think it will be quite interesting (and it’s free) – please send a note to “media-facades” at “swissnexsanfrancisco” dot org.

[Image: Elias Redstone stands inside the facade of Casa Poli, designed by Pezo von Ellrichshausen Architects; read more about his visit to the house here. Photo by Jaffer Kolb].

Regrettably, I have not until now pointed readers’ attention to the soon-to-finish travels of Elias Redstone, curator of London’s Architecture Foundation, as he visits the work of emerging Latin American architects, from Mexico to Colombia, Chile to Argentina and Brazil, documenting the whole thing on his blog.
This massive three-and-a-half month tour, funded by a Winston Churchill Fellowship, comes to a close on April 1, when Elias returns to London. His huge roster of site visits – heavy with modern residential design – is worth a scroll, as are his visits to the architects’ offices. He even drops in on our Postopolitan friends, Arch Daily.
Check out the blog for more.
Let me randomly add, by the way, that I would absolutely and genuinely love to do the Australian equivalent of this trip…

[Image: Photo by Satya Pemmaraju, courtesy of the Architectural League].

Here are some upcoming events, courses, and lectures that I would attend if I could:

—Tonight, March 26, author William L. Fox speaks in Reno at the Nevada Museum of Art about his new exhibition, co-curated with Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, about the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Hopefully Fox will also discuss his newest book, Aereality: The World From Above; Fox’s books are an ongoing exploration of “extreme environments” and their impact on human cognition, from Antarctica and the gridless deserts of Nevada to the Australian Outback and even Mars.

—Also today, March 26, kicking off in Los Angeles (and then again four days from now, on March 30, in Chicago) is an Urban Escape and Evasion course run by the group OnPoint Tactical. The premise of this is hilarious but fascinating: “While on an international business trip, you are kidnapped and held for ransom. A terrorist attack closes the business district and you find yourself in a fix. How do you stay alive? How do you get to safety on your own?”

This class provides leading-edge skills to civilians who live and work in challenging urban environments or in urban centers that may destabilize during a crisis. Topics covered include covert movement (day vs. night), the judicious use of caches, understanding urban baseline movement and urban awareness training, the use of urban disguises and false papers/identification, lock picking, escaping from unlawful custody, obtaining and driving local transportation, the use of “specialized” urban gear, and instruction on how to develop urban escape and evasion go-bags, etc.

If you already know how to do all that, of course, there are also advanced courses. For that, somewhere in the Philadelphia/Camden, NJ, area, beginning April 30, trainees will “spend time in the city in an extensive (extended) escape and evasion simulation. Students will be required to obtain food, water, and shelter. They will need to avoid capture, and they will be required to complete several tests or scenarios that will require advanced students to truly apply their scout and urban survival skills.” I love OnPoint’s final line: “Warning: Massive waiver required for this course!” These “urban survival” courses are run in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, Salt Lake City, and Conway, Arkansas. If only I had known about OnPoint earlier, I would have invited them to speak at Postopolis! LA. Check out their lock-picking gear. (Spotted via kottke.org).

[Image: Think you’ll survive a corporate kidnapping (or the coming apocalypse)? OnPoint Tactical disagrees; sign up for their courses to learn more].

—March 27-29: The City From Below hits Baltimore, Maryland, exploring, among other things, how “unanticipated futures are being imagined and built” in the contemporary metropolis. My problem with the event write-up, however, is that participating in “social justice struggles” appears to mean adopting a new, niche vocabulary full of analytically useless words like “herstories” – i.e. feminism’s own “Freedom Fries” moment – excluding from your audience many of the very people who would benefit most from such discussions. Emerging forms of grassroots urban self-governance don’t require bizarre, over-academized newspeak about “metropolitan rearticulation” and “horizontal framework[s] of participation.” We don’t need to know that you’ve read Judith Butler in order to organize a better youth basketball league, plant a roof garden, or campaign for affordable day care. I also have a growing problem with the fetishization of “resistance” in today’s leftwing political writing, as if “resisting” something is, in and of itself, a technique that only the left is capable of performing. But the Bush Administration “resisted” the Geneva Conventions and Alberto Gonzales “resisted” civil liberties laws, even as the Mormon Church “resisted” gay marriage in California. Resistance has no political affiliation, and it is tactically meaningless to promote resistance as a goal in and of itself. One need look no further than the conservative Counter-Reformation; as its very name indicates, this was a massive act of cultural and intellectual resistance. Indeed, to pretend that “resistance” is worthy of commendation at all only makes sense if you’ve built your entire movement around a shifting sequence of enemies who, by your own admission, are always one step ahead of you. The alternative – articulating, out of the blue and in the middle of nowhere, unsolicited enthusiasm for a more equitable future for everyone – would seem both substantially more effective and unifying. It seems little wonder, then, that many otherwise intensely interesting urban social justice movements remain rhetorically self-ghettoized, when their own communication strategies seem to exclude the very people they most urgently need to convince.

—On Monday, March 30, London’s Complex Terrain Laboratory will begin a four-day symposium about P. W. Singer’s important new book Wired for War (previously mentioned on BLDGBLOG here). As the event unfolds, regular updates will be posted online.

[Image: Ecological Urbanism at the Harvard GSD].

—If it wasn’t for Postopolis! LA, I would be in Boston, attending Harvard’s Ecological Urbanism conference, running April 3-5. “While climate change, sustainable architecture, and green technologies have become increasingly topical,” we read, “issues surrounding the sustainability of the city are much less developed.”

The conference is organized around the premise that an ecological approach is urgently needed both as a remedial device for the contemporary city and an organizing principle for new cities. An ecological urbanism represents a more holistic approach than is generally the case with urbanism today, demanding alternative ways of thinking and designing.

Speakers include – and the list looks great – Rem Koolhaas, Andrea Branzi, Stefano Boeri, Anuradha Mathur, and super-dean Mohsen Mostafavi, among many, many others.

—Saturday, April 4, in Montreal, the excellent Canadian Centre for Architecture will sponsor Mapping Rural Montréal: “Artist Amy Franceschini leads an exploration of rural sites and activities in Montréal, questioning the dichotomy of country and city (in English). $10 per person. Free for children under 12. Reservations required: (514) 939-7026.”

—On April 25, Esotouric will be hosting a bus tour of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles: “Bungalows. Crime. Hollywood. Blondes. Vets. Smog. Death. This was Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, which resonated from deft and melancholy fits of his writer’s bow.” Esotouric’s Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles tour also looks well worth a spin.

—Finally, for now – as there are dozens and dozens of other amazing events I could mention – the Architectural League in New York is hosting what sounds like an exciting two-day conference called New Architectures of India, from April 30-May 1. It will “address the architectural and urban forms that are emerging as a turbulent ‘second modernity’ rearranges a vast part of the landscape of India.”

All of these are barely the tip of the iceberg, however; I’ll hope to keep track of other lectures, events, gallery openings, conferences, courses, and such like as the year trundles on.

[Image: From ¡Super NAFTA Land! by Richie Gelles].

Another project from the Rice University final thesis reviews that I helped to jury back in January is Richie Gelles’s project ¡SUPER NAFTA LAND!.
That project imagines a kind of Mad Max salvage economy, made up of equal parts post-industrial subculture and bioengineered agri-futurism, set along the US/Mexico border.
Think of it as the sci-fi-inflected spatio-cultural wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement (or NAFTA) – falling somewhere between a new, continent-spanning red light district and a super-ranch run by Al Jourgensen.

[Images: From ¡Super NAFTA Land! by Richie Gelles; be sure to view the sections much larger: Estado de la Tierra and Estado del Aire].

This border region is “a dynamic, hybridized, and rapidly growing regional zone,” Gelles writes, “known as ‘Amexica’ or the ‘third space.'”
He continues, outlining the broader political intentions of the project:

The emergence and potential of this “third space” as an economic engine and potential immigration buffer has been jeopardized by US policies towards Mexico such as the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which insists on understanding the border as a line, rather than its reality as a blurred zone of transition. This project proposes building a thickened, connective infrastructural corridor landscape to unite the sister cities (in place of the divisive 700 miles of fence currently under construction by the US government) and generate the resources and conditions for an independent, neutral border nation to emerge.

The result is ¡SUPER NAFTA LAND!, “a giant self-sufficient artificial landscape growing out of the border,” its infrastructure consisting of “a modular system of production pods to generate enough food, water, and energy for the entire border population.”
Awesomely, Gelles’s vision of an Estado de la Tierra and an Estado del Aire includes linked megastructures assembled for the purpose of aeroponic gardening.

[Image: From ¡Super NAFTA Land! by Richie Gelles].

It’s the borderzone as micronation.
Read a bit more about the project through Gelles’s Flickr set – or, even better, stop by his Tumblr site for further updates. For what it’s worth, ¡SUPER NAFTA LAND! could easily become a much larger, long term research project, similar to Fernando Romero’s Hyperborder; I’ll be interested to see where Gelles might take this.

(¡SUPER NAFTA LAND! was produced at Rice University under the direction of Carlos Jimenez. Thesis advisors were Eva Franch Gilabert and Fares El Dahdah; thesis readers were John Casbarian, Albert Pope, and Fiamma Montezemolo).

[Image: From the amazing Superheroes series by photographer Gregg Segal].

As many readers will no doubt know, the New York Times last week sent a “cease and desist” letter to Apartment Therapy, demanding that AT stop posting New York Times proprietary material on their website.
Though the story has since undergone a few less confrontational developments – i.e. Apartment Therapy “reached both the NYTimes legal and marketing [departments] on Friday and they called off their take down notice pending our initial conversation” – the issue is still a very valid one, and it cuts to the heart of many financial problems now facing both print and online media.
As but one example, it has always struck me as somewhat economically lopsided that in order for Dwell to run a photograph in the magazine, we have to pay the photographer a not inconsiderable use fee; but that I, as BLDGBLOG, can simply post that photograph – or Dezeen can post it, or materialicious, or Apartment Therapy – and, at least for now, no one has to pay a cent. (See further thoughts on this sentence in the comment thread, below).
In this business model, magazines like Dwell and Wallpaper – or the New York Times – become a kind of unacknowledged production budget for architecture blogs (this site included). Metropolis pays for a photographer to fly to, say, Chicago or Melbourne or Eagle Rock… and an architecture blog then gets free photographs to post on their website, from which they can earn a constant stream of advertising revenue.
From the perspective of an architecture and design blogger, it can’t help but feel a bit like the easy money days of the derivatives market: you wait till someone else pays for a photographer to document something, and then you jump in and skim ad revenue off of that transaction.
The value of your website is derived value; if the magazine photography economy were to collapse, so would your third-party ability to extract revenue from it.
While I was Senior Editor at Dwell, this hit some particularly surreal notes, such as when an architecture blogger – whose entire visual content has been bought and paid for by other people – emailed me to accuse Dwell of stealing from architecture blogs because we had run images (at no small expense to us) of houses that once appeared on that person’s website.
In any case, my point here is not to argue, regressively, from the standpoint of magazines (after all, BLDGBLOG has been around for 5 years, hosting other people’s photographs) or to advance a kind of 1990s-era model of intellectual property, but to point out that this conversation is far from resolved – and that I’m thus particularly excited to announce that Postopolis! LA will include an entire panel about this very subject.
Catherine Ledner, Dave Lauridsen, Gregg Segal, Misha Gravenor, and Tom Fowlks, professional photographers who have worked for the likes of National Geographic, Wired, Newsweek, Dwell, Popular Science, Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, and countless others, will be joining us on Saturday, April 4, to talk about the financial and/or reputational pros and cons of blogs, magazines, online portfolios, Flickr accounts, and so on.
It’s interesting, for instance, in this context, that even mundane technical questions – such as whether to host your work online via a Flash website (which prevents bloggers from downloading your work) – are actually legally motivated decisions made to protect the financial integrity of your portfolio, not aesthetic or stylistic choices at all.
So what do these photographers think of Flash as a form of self-protection? Or of seeing their work on architecture blogs – or, for that matter, of never seeing their work on architecture blogs? Does this result in more (or fewer) paid commissions? What is the ideal balance here between exposure and financial compensation?
The questions are innumerable, and come as part and parcel of the ongoing implosion of the publishing industry, with newspapers and magazines folding (or laying off staff) left and right, and with no realistic new business model yet taking shape.
Watch for this panel coming up on the evening on Saturday, April 4. It will take place in the context of an entire day themed about the future of media, with editors-in-chief, bloggers, journalists, and many more on hand to discuss the changing industrial landscape.
By the way, the complete Postopolis! LA schedule will be announced shortly – so stay tuned!

Postopolis! LA has been gathering pace over the past few weeks, despite the silence, so it seemed like high time for an update. Although we’re still finalizing both the schedule and the list of speakers, it’s looking amazing so far.

[Image: Logo by Joe Alterio].

The whole thing kicks off in less than two weeks, running from Tuesday, March 31, to Saturday, April 4, and from 5pm-11pm everyday.
The venue has finally been announced, as well: we’ll be up in the sky, watching the sun set every evening from the rooftop pool, deck, and bar of the Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The event is free and open to everyone, with a cash bar and free wifi, so come on down for some landscape and architecture, bring your favorite wireless device, and wear your Speedo or bikini if you want to use the pool (it’s more like a wading pool, FYI). And, of course, we’ll be keeping our fingers crossed for no rain.
The list of speakers, as it now stands, includes unbelievably interesting people. Here’s a glimpse:

—Ari Kletzky (Founder, Islands of LA)
—Austin Kelly (Principal, XTEN Architecture)
—Ava Bromberg (Artist, In the Field)
—Ben Cerveny (Strategic and Conceptual Advisor, Stamen Design)
—Benjamin Bratton (Architect and Theorist)
—Bryan Boyer (Organizer, Helsinki Design Lab 2010)
—Christina Ulke (Artist, Co-Founder, C-Level, and Editor, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest)
—Christopher Hawthorne (Architecture Critic, Los Angeles Times)
—David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young (Founders, fallen fruit)
—David Gissen (Theorist and Historian, CCA)
—Dwayne Oyler (Architect and Principal, Oyler Wu Collaborative)
—Eric Rodenbeck (Founder, Stamen Design)
—Freya Bardell and Brian Howe (Principals, Greenmeme)
—Fritz Haeg (Artist and Writer)
—Gary Dauphin (Writer and Critic)
—Jeffrey Inaba (Architect and Principal, Inaba Projects)
—Ken Ehrlich (Artist and Writer)
—Mary-Ann Ray (Architect, Writer, and Principal, Studio Works Architects)
—Matthew Coolidge (Director, Center for Land Use Interpretation)
—Michael Dear (Professor of Geography, USC)
—Michael Downing (Deputy Chief of Counter Terrorism, Los Angeles Police Department)
—Mike the Poet (Poet and Writer)
—Orhan Ayyüce (Architect, Blogger, and Senior Editor, Archinect)
—Patrick Keller (Architect and Principal, Fabric)
—Paul Petrunia (Founder, Archinect)
—Robert Miles Kemp (Designer and Principal, Variate Labs)
—Sam Grawe (Editor-in-Chief, Dwell)
—Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee (Architects and Principals, Johnston MarkLee)
—Stephanie Smith (Founder, Ecoshack)
—Steve Roden (Musician and Artist)
—Ted Kane (Architect and Author, Polar Inertia)
—Whitney Sander (Architect and Principal, Sander Architects)
—Yo-Ichiro Hakomori (Architect and Principal, wHY Architecture)
—Zach Frechette (Editor-in-Chief, GOOD)

That’s nowhere near the final list, though, as we’ve also got a handful of media panels planned for Saturday, April 4; these will include Matt Chaban from the Architect’s Newspaper, Dakota Smith from Curbed LA, Greg J. Smith of Serial Consign & Vague Terrain, journalist Alissa Walker, a variety of Archinect school bloggers, and many, many more.
So stay tuned for more updates.
And, don’t forget, Postopolis! LA will be hosted by BLDGBLOG, City of Sound, mudd up!, Plataforma Arquitectura/Arch Daily, Subtopia, and we make money not art, under the organization of the Storefront for Art and Architecture and the sponsorship of ForYourArt.
Hope to see you there!

[Image: So good you can’t see it: a hunter wearing a Ghillie suit].

For some reason I found myself looking at Ghillie Suits last week, and I couldn’t resist writing a post about them.
Manufactured under the tagline “It’s what they don’t see that’s important!” Ghillie suits are made for paintball – but they are an amazing example of fashion design and landscape simulation together in one. Less a style of dress, they use garments to represent – and thus blend into – the earth’s surface.

[Images: Two more examples of Ghillie suits – the visual effect of the suits are somewhat undercut by the model’s posture].

You might say that these suits are mobile, replicant earths – minor terrains on the move – a statement seemingly backed up by the incredible “HUMUS® Cover Scent,” marketed by the same firm. HUMUS® is an “oil based product that gives off the smell of decaying leaves and allows you to smell like a part of the forest.”
I’m embarrassed to admit this, because it now seems obvious, but I had never actually thought of hunting as a local repertoire of earth-replication techniques, techniques through which you can become as much like the surface of the earth as possible. This then distracts and fools other organisms – and allows you to step in for the kill.
Looked at this way, hunting becomes a kind of planetary pas de deux – which is just a pretentious way of saying that if you act like the planet, you can kill that which lives upon it most efficiently.
Or, to put it one other way, well-camouflaged hunters are masterful practitioners of the landscape arts – but their contributions to any potential conversation about landscape design have been overlooked for ideological reasons (i.e. they’re hunters, not academics, and never the twain shall meet).

[Image: This suit apparently only weights 2.25 lbs. Photo courtesy of Ghillie Suits].

Whatever you might think of wildlife slaughter, though, how unbelievably interesting would it be to get Ghillie suit designers, deep wilderness hunters, and some landscape theorists together for a long afternoon of spatialized discussions. Throw in some anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer tribes and maybe some military camouflage field testers – and, at the very least, you’ve got yourself an interesting book proposal.
After all, what Deleuze has to say about landscape is meant to be interesting; but what about the guys who run Ghillie Suits? Or the editors of King’s Outdoor World or Predator Xtreme? Invite them to your next landscape architecture conference.
In any case, the instructions for how to build your own Ghillie suit are an amazing, if unintentional, act of sartorial landscape criticism, turning clothing into hyper-accurate representations of the local plantlife.
Finally, for a few more images don’t miss the Ghillie suit product slideshow.

(Related: Urban Camouflage).

[Image: From Library of Dust by David Maisel].

In an earlier post, I mentioned that there will be at least one more big event coming up in New York City that I’ll be a part of; the information for that is now available (at least on Facebook!).
On Monday, April 13, from 7-9pm, the New York Institute for the Humanities will be hosting a celebration of David Maisel’s recent, beautiful, and widely praised book Library of Dust.
This will take place at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, housed in an extraordinary, blue-ceilinged synagogue at 172 Norfolk Street, and it will be led by the indefatigable Lawrence Weschler.
Here’s a map.
The list of participants looks absolutely amazing, and I’m thrilled to be a part of this group. In addition to Maisel and Weschler, there will be writer, professor, and historian of photography Ulrich Baer; author Rachel Cohen; writer and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht; art historian Karen Lang; novelist Jonathan Lethem; photographer Joel Meyerowitz; novelist Ted Mooney; filmmaker Bill Morrison; Magnum photojournalist Gilles Peress; president of Wesleyan University and historian Michael Roth; author and critic Luc Sante; and poet Vijay Seshadri.
It sounds like an unbelievably interesting evening – and I hope to bring something to the table myself, as author of one the essays in Maisel’s Library of Dust.
So if you’re in New York that night, please come check it out – and more information about the event, including ticket pricing and availability, should hopefully be up on the Orensanz Foundation’s site soon, or on the website of the New York Institute for Humanities.
Also, on a tangent, should you be in Philadelphia, Lawrence Weschler will be speaking tomorrow night at the Penn Humanities Forum. If you don’t know Weschler’s book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, then you need to pick up a copy ASAP.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Library of Dust. On Archinect: Interview with David Maisel).