Book Launch for “Writings on Architecture and the City” by George Baird



0:00 Introduction by Laura Miller
8:01 Richard Sommer presentation
18:33 Robert Levit presentation
28:19 Roberto Damiani presentation
38:10 Moderated discussion

On March 3, 2015, the Daniels Faculty hosted a book launch for “Writings on Architecture and the City” – a collection of essays by former dean and Professor Emeritus George Baird. A panel including Dean Richard Sommer, Professor Robert Levit, Post Doctoral Fellow Roberto Damiani and Professor Laura Miller discussed the impact of this work.

George Baird has received the Gold Medal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (2010) and the Topaz Medallion of the American Institute of Architects and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (2012).

Baird’s publications include (with Charles Jencks) Meaning in Architecture (1969), Alvar Aalto (1969), The Space of Appearance (1995) and Public Space; Cultural/Political Theory; Street Photography (2011).

His most recent book, “Writings on Architecture and the City”, begins in 1967 with “La dimensione amoureuse in Architecture” a “small classic” which was a seminal text in the formulation of what we now know as “architectural theory”, and continuing across the span of that career, the volume also includes such notable essays as “les extremes qui se touche”, a 1978 text on the work of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture that Pier Vittorio Aureli has called “prescient”, and “Criticality and Its Discontents” of 1974. Other texts included range widely across contemporary architecture and urbanism, offering accounts of numerous architects, buildings, critics, historians and architectural and urban ideas. In his introduction to the volume Francesco Garofalo remarks: “the reader will discover in this collection … a rare author who is optimistic at the same time that he is radical and critical about the chances of architecture in the contemporary world”.

For more information about the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, visit us at http://www.daniels.utoronto.ca

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