09/21/2015
The countryside is often presented as bucolic, close to nature; the city, by contrast, as artifice shaped by capital. Raymond Williams addressed many of the fallacies of this disjuncture in his classic study The Country and the City (1973). What has happened to the countryside since then, and what is the relationship between the urban and the rural today? While a great deal of scholarly attention has been dedicated to urban development and urbanization, the study of the rural has lacked a comparable systematic analysis. This event is the first in a series devoted to the countryside, intending to address that imbalance. The school also plans to offer a Rotterdam-based option studio devoted to the topic in the spring of 2016.
Introduction by Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean and Alexander Wiley Professor of Design Main presenter: Frédéric Bonnet, codirector, Équipe Obras; Lecturer at the Accademia dell’architettura, Mendrisio, Switzerland; winner of the 2014 Grand Prix de l’Urbanisme With short statements by: Anita Berrizbeitia, professor of landscape architecture and chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at Harvard GSD Neil Brenner, professor of urban theory; director of the Urban Theory Lab at Harvard GSD John Dixon Hunt, visiting professor of landscape architecture at Harvard GSD; emeritus professor of the history and theory of landscape, University of Pennsylvania Christopher Lee, associate professor in practice of urban design at Harvard GSD
