The Canadian Centre for Architecture announces Sensing the City II, a free lecture series on Thursdays at 7:00 pm from April 20th to May 25th, 2006 in the Paul Desmarais Theatre. Presented in conjunction with the CCA’s major exhibition Sense of the City, the series advances new readings of the urban environment through city surfaces and sensory phenomena. Featuring speakers whose work appears in the exhibition, the lectures will address lighting and fear in public space, city soundscapes, unconventional asphalt, and designing for cold climates.
On April 20th, New York environmental psychologist and Principal of Tillett Lighting Design, Linnaea Tillett presents Urban Fear: What’s Light Got to Do With It? Specializing in public space, Tillett uses lighting to enhance the vitality of community life. She is particularly interested in issues of security and perceptions of safety in nighttime public environments. Her lecture will address new ways of looking at planning, safety, and lighting within a dynamic urban context.
Louis Dandrel, musician and composer, offers couter la ville: Voyage sonore travers les mtropoles du monde on May 4th (in French). In 1980, Dandrel founded Diasonic, a studio in Paris devoted to sound in architecture and design, and a research unit, later transferred to IRCAM at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Dandrel’s lecture will feature recordings collected over the past 40 years in major cities around the world, including Bombay, Dakar, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo, Beijing, and Cairo. For Dandrel, urban sounds are at once anthropological tools and artistic inventions in their own right. Presented with the support of the Consulat general de France Qubec.
Landscape architect and Founder of Bro Kiefer in Berlin, Gabriele G. Kiefer discusses Playing with Asphalt on May 18th. Landscape architecture, for Kiefer, extends beyond conventional elements of garden design to incorporate open, flexible spaces and urban materials such as asphalt and steel. Kiefer will offer new perspectives on a familiar material in a presentation of her projects involving the creative and often playful use of asphalt. This lecture is presented in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Montral.
Sensing the City II concludes on May 25th with Cities Designed for Winter by Norman Pressman, Professor of Planning and Urban Design at the University of Waterloo. Pressman’s research emphasizes sustainable development, climatological planning, mobility, and urban design. His lecture will examine the influence of climatic conditions on cities and their inhabitants in order to develop an authentic urban form for northern places.
Until September 10th, 2006, Sense of the City is a major exhibition dedicated to the theme of urban phenomena and perceptions which have traditionally been ignored, repressed, or maligned. Challenging the dominance of the visual in the urban environment, the exhibition proposes a re-thinking of latent qualities of the city, offering complex analyses of the comforts, communication systems, and sensory dimensions of urban lifethus advancing a new spectrum of experience and engagement.
For more information on the Sensing the City II lecture series, please visit www.cca.qc.ca/programs or call (514) 939-7026.