Friday, April 15, 2016
Wood Auditorium
Spanning the planet, the dynamics of climate change bind together innumerable, often incompatible categories, things, and processes. Among these are energy infrastructures, politics, nature, biological and social life, and the built and unbuilt environment. The struggles and contradictions they entail, and the powers they sustain, impose limits on our capacity to grasp their connections and to conceive alternatives. This event, which brings together contributors from comparably disparate domains, will explore some of those connections imaginatively and concretely, in the past, present, and possible future. It inaugurates the Buell Center’s new, long-term research project, “Power,” which extends the Center’s recent work on housing, inequality, and real estate into another dimension of the planetary commons. Where the earlier research began with an analysis of land ownership and its relation to housing and the public sphere, “Power” begins with the air circulating above that land, the energy coursing through it, and the earth below it, all in relation to the lives lived within it.
Keynote Address 6:00pm
“Utopia Against Finance”
Kim Stanley Robinson is a New York Times bestselling science fiction writer whose work has been translated into twenty-five languages. He is the author of the Mars trilogy—an international bestseller currently being turned into a TV series, as well as of Aurora, Shaman, 2312, Galileo’s Dream, and Green Earth, among many others. Robinson is the winner of numerous prestigious prizes in the field, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards, and currently serves on the board of the Sierra Nevada Research Association.
with response by Phillip Wegner and discussion moderated by Reinhold Martin, Director, Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture
