Forensic Aesthetics - Roundtable I: Forensic Architecture | The New School

Vera List Center for Art and Politics | http://www.veralistcenter.org | http://www.newschool.edu/vlc

Roundtable I: Forensic Architecture

Buildings are both sensors and agents. They materialize political and economical forces, and also the events that befall them. Buildings undergo constant formal transformations in response to forces. They expand and contract with temperature and with the slow degeneration of their component materials, registering transformation in humidity, air quality, CO2 levels, salinity, seismic movements -- and sometimes also the abrupt or violent events that target them or simply happen next to them. Some of these processes can be reconstructed through structural calculations, blast analyses, and the determination of the failure points of structures, details, and forms.

Participants:
Nikolaus Hirsch, Städelschule, Frankfurt a.M., Germany, moderator
Eve Hinman, Hinman Consulting Engineers, New York/San Francisco
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Columbia University
Norman Weiss, GSAPP, Columbia University

THE NEW SCHOOL FOR PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT | http://www.newschool.edu/public-engagement

Forensic Aesthetics positions "things" as "witnesses" and ascribes to them the power of speech and therefore an agency similar to that of the testimony of human witnesses of a crime. With a focus on the staging of such material witness accounts, the participants examine the political implications of calling on things.

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Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and co-sponsored and co-organized with The Forensic Architecture ERC Projectat The Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, and The Human Rights Project at Bard College, on occasion of the Vera List Center's 2011-2013 focus theme "Thingness."

Location: Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building
11/05/2011 11:30 a.m. -- 1:00 p.m.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• The New School
• New School University
• New School
• Vera List Center
• Carin Kuoni
• Buildings
• Architecture
• Matter
• Material
• Structures
• Economy
• Nikolaus Hirsch
• Eve Hinman
• Jorge Otero-Pailos
• Norman Weiss
• objects
• inert things
• subjects
• passive
• active
• things
• witness
• power
• agency
• Thingness
• Something
• Evidence