Cambridge Talks VII
PhD students at the Graduate School of Design explore the connection and shared history of buildings and byways  

Conference: Friday, March 29, 9 a.m.–6 p.m.

Piper Auditorium, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

40 Quincy Street, Cambridge

No building is an island – and in the context of the city, architecture takes shape in relation to the street. Arcades and façade treatments, lighting fixtures and shop windows, setback and building height restrictions: each of these mediate how buildings interact with streets as spaces of visual display and public sociability. More recently, the construction of flyovers and underground transport systems has transformed streets into ever-more complex, multi-layered spatial armatures for architectural intervention. Streets serve as the liminal zones by which architectural form and symbolism meet with the contingencies of urban life.

Cambridge Talks VII seeks to bring fresh historical themes and tools to bear on the problem of “Architecture and the Street.” New research promises to enrich and challenge perspectives pioneered by Spiro Kostof, Jane Jacobs, and Stanford Anderson.

Among the questions we’ll be asking:

* How does the infrastructural function of streets as circulation (of people, goods, water, and waste) press against the static character of architecture?

* How do streets serve as the spatial framework for social control, ceremony, procession, and protest?

* How might we theorize and historicize modern streets as sites of cultural memory and nostalgia?

* And above all, what are the effects of such social, political, and technological forces on architectural form?

Learn more:

www.gsd.harvard.edu/cambridgetalks2013