Tom Gilmore begins by showing a photograph of the earth at night, in which the urban areas are revealed by their lights. He hopes SCI-Arc’s new City Chair will encourage students to engage creatively with this new urbanized world. He reviews the East Coast environments of his formative years to emphasize the shock of arriving in Los Angeles. He describes being particularly astonished by the downtown as a place with little relevance to anyone’s work, and no evening or weekend life. He and Jerri Perroni began restoring empty old buildings around 4th and Main, starting what would evolve into the Old Bank District. Gilmore characterizes cities as civilization’s repositories of information, and discusses various cities around the world in terms of being ascendant, declining, bi-polar, and faux, while stressing that cities evolve constantly and they evolve incrementally. Gilmore surveys buildings he describes as “catalytic,”–meaning buildings that dramatically change for the better the life and image of a place. He stresses how a building’s iconic punch may not really be what matters most–citing the London Shard’s transportation hub, and the lively neighborhood that’s developed around the Shanghai CCTV. Gilmore describes smaller-scale buildings as “axial interventions,” which alter a neighborhood, citing the Seville Parasol, the Maxxi Museum, Eric Owen Moss’s work in Culver City. He points out that the High Line in New York’s Lower West Side is not just a pretty garden but has become a developmental spine. Gilmore concludes by showing a photograph of earth at night, in which the urban spaces define the world the next generation of architects will build in.
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