Wednesday May 25, 2011 at 5:00pm
Building 8, Level 11, Lecture theatre 68
360 Swanston St
CBD,
Melbourne
Victoria,
Australia
3000
Professor David Gissen
Associate Professor, California College of the Arts
6:00pm in RMIT 8.11.68 (not 6:30pm as in our Friday sessions)
Presented in collaboration with Kerb Journal
on the web:
This lecture offers an overview of my interest in an anti-naturalistic approach to nature within the discipline of architecture. An anti-naturalist approach avoids positioning nature as either an external or internal essence — a concept found within aesthetics that emphasize natural systems, flows, and processes. In place of neo-naturalism, I often examine those natures that are produced within and through the trauma of urbanization and its history. Things such as mud, dankness, and smoke interest me as counter-natural substances. Such natures are generally, but not absolutely, threatening, troubling, stagnant, and inherently difficult to absorb into both nature and architecture as a thing and idea. I label these troubling forms of nature “subnature” and remain intriqued by their potential agiational relationship to the natural within architecture. In explaining these concepts I will often turn to a variety of historical and contemporary work that rethinks the concept of “ground” in architecture from this anti-naturalistic perspective.
DAVID GISSEN, Associate Professor, California College of the Arts, is a historian and theorist of architecture and urbanism. Recent work focuses on developing a novel concept of nature in architectural thought and developing experimental forms of architectural historical practice. David is the author of the book Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), editor of the “Territory” issue of AD Journal (2010), and editor of the book Big and Green (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003). His essays are published in journals such as AA Files, AD Energies, Grey Room, Log, Volume, The Radical History Review, The Journal of Architecture, The Journal of Architectural Education, and Thresholds; magazines Architectural Record, Metropolis, Domus, ARCADE, Cabinet, and Constructs; and books Models and Drawings (Routledge, 2007), Design Ecologies (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), Writing Urbanism (Routledge, 2008), The Ethics of Dust (TBA/Venice Biennale, 2009), and The Religious Imagination in Modern Architecture: A Reader (Routledge, 2011). His curatorial, experimental historical, and design work has been staged at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, National Building Museum, Yale Architecture Gallery, Maryland Institute College of Art, Toronto Free Gallery, and The Museum of the City of New York.
Gissen lectures on his work internationally, including recent invited talks at Princeton University, The Royal Danish Academy of Art, The Bartlett School of Architecture, The Humanities Center of the University of California Santa Barbara and “Postopolis!” LA, sponsored by The Storefront for Art and Architecture. He is the recipient of various awards and grants including Graham Foundation grants, the Richard J. Carroll Lectureship from Johns Hopkins University, and the Chalsty Award at CCA.