Month: October 2008

I’m also pleased to announce that I’ll be on the jury for a design competition hosted in Chicago next month, brought to you by the Chicago Architectural Club. The purpose of the competition is to rethink – and redesign – Chicago’s Union Station, updating it for an era of high-speed rail travel in the United States.
Unfortunately, it’s a bit late in the game to be announcing this: designs are due by October 15!
But I’ve uploaded the competition brief to my Flickr page, so check it out �– and hopefully it’s not too late for some of you to participate.
I’ll be meeting with the jury to announce our decision on Sunday, November 9; you can read more about that here.
But if our transportation options change, and high-speed rail does become an infrastructural fact of American life, then how can the design of our cities keep pace? What will Chicago – indeed, what will all metropolitan forms in the American midwest – look like in the year 2020, if high-speed rail becomes a viable option? Will we see future super-cities hot-linked one to another across the plains – or simply well-made train stations plunked into existing cities here and there?
While I’m in Chicago next month I will also be hosting an amazing panel with Jeffrey Inaba, Sam Jacob, and Joseph Grima, easily three of the most interesting people working in architecture today – but I’ll be posting more about that soon.

A quick note before I hit the highway: I’ll be interviewing Vito Acconci on Saturday, live in Reno at the Nevada Museum of Art. This will be part of the Museum’s 2008 Art + Environment Conference, previously discussed here.

[Image: Vito Acconci, Blinks, Nov 23, 1969].

From an article about Acconci’s work in The New York Times:

”My biggest fear is that architecture is necessarily a kind of totalitarian activity, a kind of prison, in that when you design a space you’re probably designing people’s behavior in that space,” he says. ”So the goal of our work is to make a mix, a mix of possible routes, a mix of alternate routes, alternate channels.”

Be sure to read Shelley Jackson’s interview with Acconci in The Believer, take a look at his work courtesy of Azure, and stop by another profile of the artist-architect over at designboom.

[Image: An artificial island in Austria, designed by Vito Acconci].

I’ll report back with details next week (and hopefully with a transcript or recording of the event), and I hope to find the time to do some blogging from the event itself.
Of course, if you’re anywhere near Reno, please stop by!

[Image: Vito Acconci, from Following Piece, 1969].

(Note that the title for this post – “A mix of possible routes” – comes from the profile of Acconci written by Aric Chen for The New York Times).