8:00-9:00 am

Sustainable Transportation

9:15-10:00 am

Trends in Urban Design

Coffee Break

8:00-9:00

Sustainable Transportation: Reinventing the Automobile

Dr. Lawrence Burns, Director, Roundtable on Sustainable Mobility, Columbia University and Professor, Engineering Practice, University of Michigan

Ever since Karl Benz drove the first car out of his barn 125 years ago, the fundamental design “DNA” of automobiles has remained nearly the same. Like the first “horseless carriages”, today’s vehicles are based on mechanical drive using a combustion engine, oil for fuel, and mechanical controls. They are also driven by people and operate as stand-alone machines. The convergence of advanced propulsion and communications/information technology has now enabled the emergence of a new automotive “DNA”. It is based on electric drive, electric motors, diverse energy sources, electronic/digital controls, “driverless” vehicle technology and the “mobility internet”. Together, these technologies promise to transform how we move around and interact. This presentation will frame this new “DNA” and discuss the resulting sustainable mobility opportunities.

Suggested readings

Mitchell, Borroni-Bird and Burns, Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century, MIT Press, 2010

Corwin and Norton, The Thought-Leader Interview: Lawrence Burns, strategy + business Magazine, August 24, 2010

Presentation

GM'S EN-V Concept Car Tackles Urbanization

9:15-10:00 am Trends in Urban Design

Dr. Richard Plunz, Professor of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University; Director, Urban Design Program; Director, Urban Design Lab

Just as our planet is experiencing a new phase of rapid urbanization, so the nature of urban infrastructure is undergoing rapid evolution. Our understanding of the new infrastructural paradigms requires managing a new complexity in terms of our knowledge base. We will explore this question through that project work of the Urban Design Lab engaging environmental concerns related to waste, water, energy and health.

Urban Design Lab website: http://www.urbandesignlab.columbia.edu/

Presentation

10:00-10:15 am Coffee Break

Innovative Infrastructure: selected projects

10:00-10:50 am Richard A. Cook, Partner, Cook + Fox Architects; Partner, Terrapin Bright Green

Company website: http://www.cookplusfox.com/

Rick Cook will discuss the issues surrounding the creation of environmentally responsible, high-performance buildings and explore the holistic definition of building performance criteria. Moving to the next level of high-performance building, we should consider not only “how we build” but also, “how we can make a difference” when we build. PlaNYC reports that buildings contribute to 80% of NYC’s vast carbon footprint- demanding immediate action to transform the urban landscape for an energy efficient future while preserving another resource: the vitality and health of urban citizens.

Proposed Discussion Topics

Manahatta
The Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy
Climate Change
New York City’s Inefficient Power Grid
Co-Generation and Thermal Ice Storage
Urban Density
Biophilia
Global Citizenship
Health & Wellbeing

Suggested readings

McDonough, William, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things

Anderson, Ray, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist

Hawken, Paul, Ecology of Commerce

Benyus, Janine, Biomimicry

Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring

Little, Amanda, Power Trip

Browning, William, Greening the Building and the Bottom Line

Kellert, Stephen, Biophilic Design

Wilson, Edward O, Biophilia

Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth

Chivian, Eric, Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity

Sanderson, Eric, Mannahatta

Willis, Carol, Building the Empire State

Hawken, Paul, Growing a Business

Franta, Greg, Cooling the Warming

Pallasmaa, Julhani, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Sense

Presentation

11:00-11:50 am James Carpenter, Founder and Principal, JCDA

Company website: http://www.jcdainc.com/

James Carpenter will present a body of work that is motivated by a deeply held agenda that seeks to explore the natural world and manifest its material, structural and environmental beauty in the built environment.  The work is a synthesis of creative ideas and technical expertise that straddles, and better integrates, the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, engineering, industry and art. The breadth of our practice allows us to both forge innovative technologies and conceive creative implementations of existing materials and processes.  Light in transmission, reflection and refraction as it is perceived, is the work’s foundation and guiding principal.  The resulting built environments reestablish and enrich the public’s relationship with the phenomena that activate their urban experience. With over 30 years of experience synthesizing the phenomena of light into the experience of architecture, JCDA has developed a wide range of strategies necessary in creating environmentally intelligent buildings and environments.  From the start of every project JCDA seeks out the natural relationship between the environmental concerns of a project with the desire to heighten the individual’s experience of place.

Suggested material

Selected projects

Presentation

12:00-12:20 pm Jhaelen Eli, Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Company website: http://www.dsrny.com/

Mr. Eli will discuss, contemporary urban design through the lens of recent DS+R projects. In his talk he will highlight the following NYC projects: Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts -- including Public Spaces throughout the campus, Alice Tully Hall, the Juilliard School, and the Hypar Pavilion Lawn and Restaurant -- and the High Line.

Suggested material

Paul Goldberger, Miracle Above Manhattan, National Geographic, April 2011, Vol. 219, No. 4, p. 122

Diller Scofidio + Renfro, FASTCOMPANY.COM, March 2010, p. 88

Justin Davidson, The Illusionists, The New Yorker, May 14, 2007, p. 126

Paul Goldberger, The Sky Line - Center Stage, The New Yorker, February 2, 2009, p. 74

Presentation

12:30-2:00 pm Lunch

1:45-2:15 pm Meeting with John Coatsworth
Dean, School of International and Public Affairs; Interim Provost, Columbia University

2:00-3:30 pm

Future cities -  physical and digital environments merge to create new urban opportunities

Assaf Biderman, Associate Director of MIT SENSEable City Lab

Small and distributed computers have become an integral part of our lives. With the ubiquity of wireless connectivity they now recombine with our physical environment. Information about urban conditions can be captured in real-time, processed, and fed back into cities, enabling new ways to monitor, understand, and experience them.

We can synchronize transportation systems, allocate energy in a smarter way, reuse our waste optimally, or respond more rapidly to emergencies. More importantly, the citizen is in the center of this momentous change. When empowered by real-time information about what’s happening around us, our capacity to make smarter decisions and new types of contribution is greatly enhanced. Like the Internet, the networked city invites participation from individuals, organizations, companies, and governments to program and design the digital architectures that will craft our urban future.

In this talk, various projects that explore this new condition will be discussed: real-time maps that use the digital exhaust of communication networks to describe urban mobility and environmental conditions, the flows of locatable trash, and mobile applications that automatically track an individual's CO2 output.

Suggested readings

Weiser, Mark. 1991. The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American (September): 94-104. Mitchell, William J. 2004. Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. The MIT Press, October 1

Greenfield, A., and M. Shepard. 2007. Urban Computing and Its Discontents. The Architectural League of New York, New York

Fuller, Matthew, and Usman Haque. 2007. Urban Versioning System 1.0. The Architectural League of New York

Williams, A., and P. Dourish. 2006. Imagining the city: The cultural dimensions of urban computing. Computer: 38–43

Thrift, N., and S. French. 2002. The automatic production of space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27, no. 3: 309–335

3Dourish, Paul and Genevieve Bell. 2007. "The infrastructure of experience and the experience of infrastructure: meaning and structure in everyday encounters with space." Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, vol. 34. p: 414-430

McGonigal, J. 2003. “This Is Not a Game”: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play. In Melbourne DAC 2003 Streamingworlds Conference Proceedings, 116–25

Archigram. 1970. "Instant City," Design Quarterly, No.78/79

Frenchman, Dennis and Francisca Rojas. 2006. "Zaragoza's Digital Mile: Placemaking in a new public realm," Places 18.2. Special issue on Media and the City

Frenchman, Dennis, Anne Beamish, and William J. Mitchell. Technology, Livability, and The Historic City: Future of Florence. 2008: MIT

Lynch, Kevin with Stephen Carr. 1968. "Where Learning Happens" in City Sense and City Design. Banerjee, Tridib and Michael Southworth, eds. p.418-429

McCollough, Malcolm. 2007. "New Media Urbanism: grounding ambient information technology. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design. vol. 34

Ratti, Carlo and Walter Nicolino. 2008. Digital Water Pavilion at Zaragoza's Milla Digital and Expo 2008. Milan: Electa

Dourish, Paul. 2004. What we talk about when we talk about context. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 8, no. 1 (February 1): 19-30

Bleecker, J. Why things matter or A Manifesto for Networked Objects-Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things, 2006

Burke, J., D. Estrin, M. Hansen, A. Parker, N. Ramanathan, S. Reddy, and M. B Srivastava. 2006. Participatory sensing. In World Sensor Web Workshop, 1–5

Cuff, Dana, Mark Hansen, and Jerry Kang. 2008. Urban sensing. Communications of the ACM 51, no. 3 (3): 24-33. doi:10.1145/1325555.1325562

Suggested material

Description of MIT SENSEable Lab

MIT SENSEable City Lab website: http://www.medialabinc.net/

Presentation

Original versions of the videos for each of MIT SENSEable Lab projects portrayed in the presentation can be found on the lab's webpage.Each of the projects is listed on the central black strip.

The MIT SENSEable Lab's YouTube channel is at: http://www.youtube.com/user/senseablecitylab

3:30-6:30 pm

NYC Visit

William Smolen

Outline of visit