Date: 2015-03-06
Time: Noon-1:30pm
Location: Room 402, SME Building, UC San Diego

Guest Speaker: Michael Kimmelman, New York Times
Chief Architecture Critici

DESCRIPTION/ABSTRACT:

This conversation with New York Times chief art and architecture critic Michael Kimmelman is part of the 2014-15 Civi Imagination Series, a collaboration among UCSD's Center for Urban Ecologies (CUE), Visual Arts and Center for Global Justice.

Kimmelman was the New York Times' longtime chief art critic – "the most acute American art critic of his generation," in the words of the Australian writer Robert Hughes. Since 2011 he has been the NYT architecture critic and has written on issues of public housing, public space, infrastructure, community development and social responsibility, including stories on redevelopment after Hurricane Sandy, as well as on public space and protest in Turkey, Rio and post-revolutionary Cairo, among other issues at home and overseas. His work as a critic and writer has helped to reshape policy and the public debate about urbanism, architecture and architectural criticism. 

The Civic Imagination Series is a  set of public programs that address pressing bio-regional and global socio- economic, urban and environmental issues. These meetings focus on a critical analysis of local conflicts in order to re-evaluate the meaning of shifting global dynamics, across geo-political boundaries, natural resources, cultural demographics, urbanization and social justice. In previous years, the series has included Eyal Weizman, Andrew Ross, Richard Sennett, Hou Hanru, MAP Office and many others.

The 2014-15 speakers represent some of theff most important and vibrant voices today in the fields of design, architecture, urbanism and social / political theory, including writer and curator Justin McGuirk (October 21, 2014); political theorist Benjamin Barber (February 5); New York Times architectural critic, Michael Kimmelman (March 6); French architect Anne Lacaton (April 7); Dutch artist-activist Jeanne Van Heeswijk (April 9); former US Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich (April 13); former Mayor of Bogota, Colombia, Antanas Mockus (May 12); and political theorist James Tully (October 29).

SPEAKER BIO:

A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Kimmelman is the author of Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre and Elsewhere, which was named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times and The Washington Post, and The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa.