RDA / RSA Spring 2016 Lecture Series: Projective Infrastructures – Diana Balmori, FASLA

Three Landscape Architects To Help Houstonians Reimagine Aging Urban Infrastructures in the Rice School of Architecture and the Rice Design Alliance Spring Lecture Series. The Rice School of Architecture and Rice Design Alliance presents the Rice Design Alliance (RDA) Spring 2016 Lecture Series: Projective Infrastructures.

Like Houston, many cities are facing the end of the functionality of the twentieth century’s elevated freeways, bridges, parking garages, railroads, and waterfronts — not to mention the ways of life that these infrastructures encouraged.

Well-known, celebrated projects like The High Line in New York City show how overlooked urban infrastructures can be reinvigorated into public spaces that also reintroduce the natural into our built environments.

At a time when Houston has begun to reposition its bayous as an amenity, transforming them from the utility of drainage ditches into the beauty of hundreds of miles of connected linear parks with Bayou Greenways, and when the impending reconfiguration of the Pierce Elevated around Downtown presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to improve the city, the Rice School of Architecture and the Rice Design Alliance present Projective Infrastructures.

Curated by Christopher Hight, Associate Professor of the Rice School of Architecture, this series will bring three internationally recognized landscape architects to help Houstonians continue to consider how the spaces between buildings — the infrastructures — might be where the future health of our cities, and our citizens, will be found.

Wednesday, January 27
Chris Reed
Founding Principal, STOSS
Associate Professor in Practice, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Among many other projects, Reed’s firm STOSS designed a vision for the Trinity Riverfront, which combines commercial, residential, recreational, ecological, and environmental interventions to bring the river closer to the city, and the city closer to the river. He is also co-editor of a recent book of essays and drawings, Projective Ecologies.

Wednesday, February 10
Christophe Girot
Director, Atelier Girot
Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture, ETH Zurich

Girot designed Invaliden Park, Berlin, one of the first open public spaces between East and West Berlin, which was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 2005.

Wednesday, February 17
Diana Balmori, FASLA
Principal, Balmori Associates

Balmori Associates has won a competition for a Cool Gardens that was installed in Winnipeg and has also launched a floating experimental vegetable garden in the Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site, in Brooklyn. Presently, the firm is a finalist in a competition to reprogram the space underneath a Downtown Cleveland elevated freeway.

All lectures will be held at 7 p.m. in the Brown Auditorium in the Caroline Wiess Law Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. A pre-lecture reception will begin at 6 p.m.