• Join Us for Van Alen's Spring 2014 Events!
• Van Alen Institute Spring Party: Wednesday, May 21
• Van Alen Leads Public Programs Throughout the Region for Rebuild by Design
• Exploring the Power of Design Competitions at the World Urban Forum in Medellín
• Special Opportunities for Van Alen Members
• Board Spotlight: Sharon Davis
• In the Field: Opportunities for Architects and Designers

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The Institute's Spring 2014 Events are coming up in May! We're looking forward to a diverse season of programs exploring urban well-being and the effects of the city on our minds and bodies.

The series launches with The Imprint of the City on Friday, May 9, a celebratory evening of performance, music, and conversation featuring designer Vito Acconci, musician C. Spencer Yeh, landscape and urban designer Diana Balmori, artist Martha Rosler, and many more. View the full program and get tickets.

Events continue through May 19 with outdoor workshops, technology demonstrations, roundtable discussions, film screenings, and more. Space is limited, so get your tickets below to join us:

Friday, May 9
The Imprint of the City
The Institute launches its spring series with a fast-paced medley of music, poetry, personal reflections, conversations, and performances by designers, artists, musicians, writers, social scientists, and more.

Saturday, May 10
Emerging Public Spaces
Join us for an outdoor, hands-on construction workshop to build a pop-up pavilion in Albee Square's pedestrian plaza, followed by a discussion of how as city-dwellers we use—and define the use of—public space.

Tuesday, May 13
How Does the Brain Respond to the City?
This interactive tech demo and discussion explores what new technologies measuring brain data can tell us about our experience of the urban environment, and if they can help us improve how we design cities.

Wednesday, May 14
What Is Well-Being, Really?
The discussion of well-being is growing stronger across fields such as design, policy, business, and the sciences. Join us for a multi-disciplinary exchange about what it means to enhance the quality of urban life.

Saturday, May 17
Urban Mindfulness
The technique of mindfulness is on the rise, but is it substance or fluff? Join us for a workshop and walking tour to try applying the technique of mindfulness to our everyday experiences in the city.

Sunday, May 18
Embodied Architecture
Explore the potential of meditation and yoga to expand our thinking about how we design and inhabit space through this guided session cultivating our awareness of the internal landscape of the body and the shared urban environment.

Monday, May 19
Outside In
This discussion and screening of four short films takes us from Times Square to the far reaches of Northern Africa, examining the links between environment, sensory experience, and well-being.
 

Thank you to our sponsor:

Media Partners:

The Institute’s Spring 2014 Events are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

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Join us on Wednesday, May 21 at The High Line Hotel for the Van Alen Institute Spring Party, celebrating our legacy and the next 120 years of innovative architecture and design.

The evening starts with a special performance by Australian-born musician White Prism, and the party continues with music by DJ and sound artist Maria Chavez. Read more about White Prism in Interview Magazine.

Get your tickets to celebrate with us on May 21!

Thank you to our Spring Party Sponsors:

Media Partner:

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Over the last nine months, Van Alen Institute has partnered with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, Municipal Art Society, and Regional Plan Association to organize Rebuild by Design, a design competition enlisting ten interdisciplinary teams to develop innovative strategies to rebuild resilient communities throughout the Hurricane Sandy-affected region.

On Thursday, April 3, more than 1,000 people throughout the region attended exhibits and receptions at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City and Brookfield Place in Lower Manhattan that showcased the teams’ final design proposals. Van Alen was the lead partner in developing the exhibits, and worked with its creative partners Bruce Mau Design and The Color Machine to produce a Supergraphic and videos introducing the project. Thanks to all who joined us!

Leading up to these events, Van Alen produced a series of public programs called “Scale it Up” designed to engage people throughout the region on the theme of resilience, and to make visible and accessible the work of the design teams. Van Alen worked closely with more than fifty community-based and municipal partners over the course of several months to shape each program based on local priorities, focusing on communities traditionally underserved by design and planning processes.

Join us for the final event in the series, Scale it Up at Earth Day Rockaway, on Saturday, May 3.

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On Sunday, April 6, Van Alen hosted What Design Competitions Can Do for Your City, a panel presented at the UN-Habitat World Urban Forum in Medellín, Colombia.

We were joined by a full audience of city and government officials, planners, and urbanists from around the world to discuss the role that competitions can play as catalysts for change in urban areas, and how competitions can advance designs toward implementation. Conversation participants included Van Alen Trustee Jessica Healy, chair of the Institute's Competitions Committee; alongside Trupti Amritwar Vaitla, Lance Brown, Teddy Cruz, Thomas G. Dallessio, and Jeffrey C. Shumaker. Read more. 

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Last month Van Alen members joined us for a special event at the incredible home of Susan and Byron Bell, architect and Van Alen Institute Trustee Emeritus. With thousands of items collected over more than 40 years of travel—walls lined with brooms, ceilings hung with baskets, and an attic full of colorful toys—the interior of the Chelsea townhouse was an unexpected surprise for all our attendees. Check out the photos to see inside their amazing home.

And in April, our members took a private tour of artist Donald Judd's Soho home and studio at 101 Spring Street. Accompanied by Van Alen Board Chair Stephen Cassell of Architecture Research Office—the team behind the building's restoration—we were treated to five floors of exquisite artwork and custom Judd-designed furniture.

Coming up next month, our members receive complimentary admission to the full Spring 2014 Events season. Join now to receive your code for free tickets to Van Alen's Spring 2014 Events!

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This month we hear from Sharon Davis, Van Alen Institute Trustee and Treasurer, about her design practice and the Institute's upcoming Elsewhere events:

The Institute’s upcoming Spring 2014 Events ask questions about what it means for design to enhance well-being in urban environments. How do you define the relationship between design and well-being in your own practice at Sharon Davis Design?

One of the things that I love about my work in Rwanda is how design can have a huge impact on small communities. In using local materials and working with unskilled laborers—who become skilled laborers through the process—you’re doing a lot more than designing a building. For me, these are critical parts of social well-being and economic empowerment. What I particularly enjoy is the challenge of incorporating solutions to issues such as labor, clean water, and waste management into the design process, because it makes design something that is useful to a community.

And how does your own focus on social justice, economic empowerment, and sustainable environments inform your involvement with Van Alen Institute?

The element of Van Alen’s mission that really dovetails with my work is engaging in the conversation about how design can contribute to society and improve the quality of live in diverse ways. New York provides a great context for testing, experimentation, and working with so many creative and forward-thinking people. And in the long run we will all be living in cities, so making the experience of living in the city a pleasurable one will be an incredibly important part of our future.

What do you most look forward to in the coming year at Van Alen?

I love the theme of Elsewhere as a playful way to approach serious issues about the way we live in cities, bringing into the spotlight a larger discussion about how people find privacy, escape, and respite in an urban context—it’s exactly the kind of conversation we should be promoting and questioning.

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LSE Cities is offering a five-day intensive from June 30 to July 4 titled London and Global Cities: Governance, Planning and Design, an exploration and analysis of governance and management in London for early-to-mid career professionals engaged in managing urban change.

The NoMa Underpass Competition has issued a Request for Qualifications seeking artists, artist teams, designers, and architects to activate four railroad underpasses in the NoMa neighborhood of Washington, D.C. as vibrant public sites. Submit by May 9.

The 2014 ONE PRIZE seeks design proposals for Smart Dock: ONE Lab educational facilities at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, an interdisciplinary center for design and science. The winning design will be developed for construction. Submit by August 31.

Artist and innovator in the field of social practice Theaster Gates will present the 10th Annual Lewis Mumford Lecture on Urbanism on Tuesday, May 1 at the City College of New York. Gates will give a lecture on “Place Over Time: New Symbols For Durational Encounters With the City.” This event is free and open to the public.

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Since its founding in 1894, Van Alen Institute has promoted innovative thinking about the role of architecture and design in civic life. Today the Institute’s competitions, research, and public programs shape the public conversation and bring design excellence to the built environment of cities and sites around the world. Learn more at www.vanalen.org.

Our ongoing programs are made possible through the generous assistance of our individual contributors and partners, and are supported, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Van Alen Institute | 30 W. 22nd St., 4th Floor | New York, NY 10010 | 212–924–7000 | www.vanalen.org