Friday, November 14 / 5:00pm
Reimagining the American City: a panel discussion on the occasion of the exhibition Freedomland
Princeton University School of Architecture, Room N-107
Keith Krumwiede's Freedomland is the latest in a long line of visionary plans for American living. It is an experiment in reconciling the seemingly incompatible needs and desires that define our current economic, environmental, and, most importantly, political climate. In one bold, absurdist move, Freedomland colonizes the super grid that blankets America, attempting in the process to solve every problem, please every citizen. Like the work of a benevolent (or perhaps delusional) dictator, it seeks to accommodate every wish, every desire, no matter how contradictory and to combine them in a master plan that sets out a beautiful, if seemingly naïve, vision for a better, more harmonious world.
Freedomland is a fiction, a work of architectural satire with no pretense toward implementation. In as much as it is the bastard lovechild of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier—think Broadacre City meets the Ville Contemporaine with a dash of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City thrown in for good measure—there is a key difference. It builds its grand vision from the basic, eminently American unit of the single-family house, working up and out by uploading conflicting desires and visions to clarify the issues—socially, environmentally, and, ultimately architecturally—that confront us at this particular moment in time.
Guests:
Albert Pope | Rice University
Ana Miljački | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Fabrizio Gallanti | Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities
Keith Krumwiede | New Jersey Institute of Technology
Martin Felsen | UrbanLab
Stan Allen | Princeton University
View the Freedomland tumblr.
This program is co-sponosored by the Center for Architecute, Urbanism and Instrastructure (CAUI) and the Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities.
