Saturday, September 16
4:00p.m. – 6:00 p.m. (Symposium)
6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. (Reception and Book Fair)
 
UIC School of Architecture, Rm 1100
845 W. Harrison Street

 

This academic year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the UIC School of Architecture, with the opening of Walter Netsch’s A+A Laboratories Building (his first field theory building on the campus) in fall 1967, and the first full professional class graduating in spring 1968, two months before the infamous “siege of Chicago” and its equally infamous chant: the whole world is watchingNow + Then will serve as a closure to the official Chicago Architecture Biennial opening weekend discussions, and as the first of a series of “Now + Then” events we are planning for the School throughout the year. 

In celebration of the checkered and cantankerous history of the School, Now + Then borrows its format from another anniversary, the 1977 symposium “The State of the Art of Architecture” organized by Stanley Tigerman at the Graham Foundation. While the first Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2015 took its name from this event, we plan to re-enact its structure. Forty years ago, this was a no-holds barred debate “in the round” among representatives of various ideological schools or groupings of the time: the Whites, Greys, Silvers, Chicago Seven, and other protagonist-polemicists of the moment (e.g., Charles Jencks). We hope to capture a similar sense of festive and frank antics, surrounding an audience that we hope to be equally engaged and enraged. While the question of whether such legible groupings exist today remains open, we do propose the potentially contentious hypothesis that history without ideology is just decorating. 

Each participant will present one historical project and one contemporary project by a fellow participant as a stimulus to a broader debate on the ways that architecture might engage and reconfigure history for its time. We expect a lively engagement with the audience, so please come prepared!
 
Participants include:
Stan Allen
Wiel Arets
Jennifer Bonner
Kersten Geers
Andrew Holder
Sam Jacob
Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen
Pier Paolo Tamburelli
Andrew Zago
 
The conversation will be moderated by:
Robert Somol
Sharon Johnston
Mark Lee
 

The symposium will be followed by a reception and a book fair showcasing recent faculty and student publications. 

 

This event is open to the public.