Conversation /
Nils Norman and Eva Díaz on “Alternative Architecture and Outlaw Design”

Date: Friday, 24 April 2009, 7–9 pm
Location: Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn (map and directions here)
FREE. No RSVP necessary

Many people today are stimulated by Buckminster Fuller’s post-war dome technologies, as well as other 1960s and 1970s-era shelter designs, to radically rethink architectural structures, both as a practical solution to urban housing crises and as a key historical trope of innovative “guerrilla” architecture. The difference today: gone is the frontiersman logic of back-to-the-land, drop-off-the-grid, atomized micro-environmentalism; gone too is the technological euphoria of the consumption of appropriate “tools.” What enters instead is a proposition of sculptural structures as temporary interventions in urban sites, of kiosk production and shelter-information display hybrids. Eva Diaz and Nils Norman will discuss these issues with special reference to Norman’s previous work and his upcoming collaboration at SculptureCenter, “The University of Trash.”

About the Participants
Nils Norman is organizing an exhibition (with Mike Cataldi) at SculptureCenter in Queens called “The University of Trash” to open in May. Drawing from utopian ideals and radical urban projects undertaken since the 1960s, the artists will create a large installation using entirely recycled and re-purposed materials.

Eva Díaz is working on “Dome Culture in the 21st Century,” a project about the influence of Buckminster Fuller on art practices today. She wrote her dissertation on models of artistic experimentation at Black Mountain College as argued by Josef Albers, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller.