Noted architect and Harvard professor George Baird will be at Cornell in April to discuss what constitutes "public" space in post-industrial America.
This year's Preston H. Thomas Memorial Lectures -- a series of four talks by Baird -- will take place in David L. Call Alumni Auditorium in Kennedy Hall, April 5 through 16, each at 5:30 p.m. The dates and topics of the lectures are:
The series is funded through a gift to Cornell's College of Architecture, Art and Planning from Ruth and Leonard B. Thomas of Auburn, N.Y., in memory of their son, Preston.
Baird is director of the master of architecture programs I and II in Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, as well as a partner in the Toronto-based architectural firm of Baird, Sampson, Neuert Inc.
These lectures will be delivered from the theory seminars and design studios offered by Baird in recent years, in which he and his students investigated the theme "On the Possibility of Public Life in the Post-Industrial City."
The argument Baird develops challenges the pessimistic accounts of this possibility that are evident in the recent arguments of Mike Davis, Frederic Jameson and Michael Sorkin.
In challenging their pessimism, Baird develops a new model of the conduct of persons together in space that links together the concept of "distraction" from the cultural theory of Walter Benjamin and "action" in the political theory of Hannah Arendt.
For more information about the lecture series, contact Margherita Fabrizio, 255-6807; e-mail: mjf24@cornell.edu.
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