Visions of the City

If you've an interest in city-building and city design, mark these lectures on your calendar.
UNC Charlotte's School of Architecture's spring lecture series is "Visions of the City." It's part of the inaugural year of UNCC's new Master's degree in Urban Design housed at the School of Architecture.

The first is in uptown. The rest are at the School of Architecture on the UNCC campus, Storrs Hall 110.

Jan. 20, 6-7:30 p.m. - "Design After the Age of Oil" - Gary Hack, Knight Theater, co-sponsored with Charlotte Center City Partners.

Hack is professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylvania. He is former chair of Philadelphia City Planning Commission and has prepared plans for more than 30 cities in the United States and abroad, and was the lead urban designer in the team of Daniel Libeskind’s winning design for redeveloping the World Trade Center site in New York. Free, but you must rsvp to: rsvp@charlottecentercity.org

Feb. 3 "Cities After the End of Cities" - Robert Fishman - 5-6:30 p.m., UNCC Storrs Hall.

Fishman is professor of architecture and urban planning at the University of Michigan and a nationally recognized expert in urban history, policy and planning and, more recently, "ex-urbs." Among his books are "Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987)," and "Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (1977)." His most recent work is on "ex-urbs."

Feb. 17 - "Planning, Ecology and Emergence of Landscape" - Charles Waldheim - 5-6:30 p.m., Storrs Hall, UNCC

Waldheim is professor and department chair of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University. He coined the term “landscape urbanism.” Professor Waldheim’s lecture will provide a historical survey of the role of landscape architecture in the formation of cities and regions, and examine several recent projects in North America that propose landscape and ecology as creative drivers of urban design. Such propositions will suggest potential models for planning, informed by contemporary understandings of landscape and ecology as new media of urban design.

Feb. 24 "Recent Work" - Yung Ho Chang. 5-6:30 p.m., UNCC Storrs Hall.
Yung Ho Chang is a professor and heads the Department of Architecture at MIT. He taught in the U.S. for 15 years before returning to Beijing to establish one of the first independent practices in China, Atelier FCJZ.