MEx – Metropolitan Exchange

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Tuesday December 8, 7 PM

with Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner

Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner of Urban Think Tank will discuss a new project, Sur Global, a film which explores the emerging landscapes and communities of tomorrow’s cities.

Free and open to the public, please RSVP to info -at- metropolitanexchange.org. (more…)

By reservation only. For more information or to make a reservation please email studio -at deckeryeadon.com

Produced by students at Pratt Institute, with help from professors David Frisco and Meredith TenHoor, the exhibit BROOKLYN EXCHANGES presents Downtown Brooklyn’s past and present development projects in order to imageine a more creative and just vision for its future. In the ground floor gallery of MEx, 33 Flatbush Ave. in Brooklyn. More information…

Urban planner/theater professional Maud Le Floc’h is an expert at establishing collaborations between artists, government officials and urban planners. At MEx, she will speak about her current work connecting the “living arts” (theater, urban art) to urban planning and urban space in France. Her presentation will be followed by a discussion comparing possibilities for this kind of work in Europe and the United States.

About Maud Le Floc’h: Maud is a French urban planner who has dedicated herself to connecting the living arts and the city. After earning a degree in urban planning and working as a journalist specializing in the street theatre scene in France, she developed and programmed festivals of live arts in the city. With Philippe Freslon, she co-founded and developed the Compagnie Off, a street theatre company in Tours, France in 1996. From 2002 to 2006, Maud conceived and led the initiative of “one elected official/one artist in the city,” through the project Mission Repérage(s), where she united an elected political official and an artist to reflect on their city, its development and future. The results, Mission Repérage(s), un élu – un artiste (Location Scouting – One Elected Official, One Artist) were published in 2006 by editions L’Entretemps. Maud is the founder and artistic director of POlau-pôle des arts urbains, a research center and platform of experimentation between artists, cultural workers, and urban planners. She is also currently a consultant for Ateliers Jean Nouvel for the “Grand Paris” project of re-envisioning the Parisian Region.

Our guests will discuss the latest architectural projects in the BAM Cultural District, the arts district in the neighborhood surrounding the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The BAM Cultural District’s plans for affordable performance and rehearsal space for non-profit visual, performing, and media arts groups as well as mixed-income housing, and new public open space are currently in various stages of progress and completion. Our guests, who are involved in the current developments, will be able to give an update on what is actually being planned, designed and built and how the current economic crisis is affecting the district and its projects.

Katie Dixon from the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership will give an update on the district as a whole, discussing the development of the master plan over the past several years, followed by special presentations by Thomase Leeser of Leeser Architects, and Ken Smith of Ken Smith Landscape Architects.

June Williamson is co-author, with Ellen Dunham-Jones, of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solution for Redesigning Suburbs, published by John Wiley & Sons.

The last fifty years have been dominated by the reproduction of sprawl development patterns. The big project for the next fifty years will be retrofitting suburban sprawl into sustainable places. The process has already begun: aging, stand-alone shopping malls and office parks are being transformed into multi-block, mixed-use town centers with public squares and greens. Ambitious new public transit networks are being proposed, constructed, and integrated into rapidly redeveloping suburban contexts. Archaic zoning ordinances are being overhauled to permit higher-density, mixed-use development, especially near transit stations. New housing types are attracting a diverse mix of young professionals, empty nesters, and families.

In Retrofitting Suburbia, Dunham-Jones and Williamson document over 80 suburban retrofits, analyzing the various strategies employed and calling attention to their potential to operate systemically to produce a polycentric pattern they call “incremental metropolitanism.”

About June Williamson:
June Williamson, RA, LEED-AP, is associate professor of architecture at The City College of New York / CUNY. She has held previous appointments at Columbia, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Utah. Her writing has been published in the journals Places and Thresholds, and in the recent anthology Writing Urbanism.

Between 1922 and 1963 a California farmer, surveyor and orchardist named Axel Erlandson designed and trained trees into sculptural and architectural forms unique in horticultural history. Axel expanded that ancient science to include chairs, towers, ladders, spiral staircases and enclosures that could be grown, rather than built. He eventually displayed his creations in a roadside attraction outside of Santa Cruz, which he named the Tree Circus.
Mark Primack discovered Erlandon’s neglected and dying trees in 1977, shortly after completing his Masters thesis on Botanic Architecture at the Architectural Association of London. His efforts to document Axel’s work, to write their history, and to protect and preserve the surviving trees were themselves fading into obscurity when his friends at the Museum of Jurassic Technology convinced him to present, in words and images (many for the first time) his remarkable record of a dedicated visionary and a creative genius.