buckminster fuller symposium, with the whitney museum

We're blogging today with a particular interest in now symposium participants might address:

• Bucky's idea of comprehensive understanding: "an understanding that does not remain stuck in the rational but becomes a comprehensive and inclusive grasping of the whole person, becoming a physical experience." --Claude Lichtenstein, Joachim Krausse (Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller The Art of Design Science, p. 16)

• Why Bucky? Why now? What does Bucky lend to the contemporary convergences of art, science, design, and architecture? And to the dilemmas and opportunities of today?

image courtesy Durl Kruse

Join us on site or online for this EMS field trip. EMS will give form to transdisciplinary exchange by live-blogging creative responses to the Whitney Museum's "Starting with the Universe" (co-sponsored by The Architectural League of New York and The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, The Cooper Union).

Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao
Dome Over Manhattan, ca. 1960
Black-and-white photograph mounted on board
13 3/4 x 18 3/8 in. (34.9 x 46.7 cm)
Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.
Image courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

Friday, September 12 - Saturday, September 13
The Great Hall of the Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street, at Astor Place

"Visionary designer, philosopher, poet, inventor, engineer, and advocate of sustainability, Buckminster Fuller was one of the great transdisciplinary thinkers of the last century with a legacy that extends to nearly every field of the arts and sciences. This symposium takes its cue from Fuller's dictum, "I always say to myself, what is the most important thing we can think about at this extraordinary moment," and explores the diverse ways in which contemporary scholars and practitioners are pushing Fuller's ideas and projects into the 21st century."
--Whitney Museum

Friday, September 12
7 pm
Keynote Roundtable
Sanford Kwinter, Rice University
Michael Sorkin, The City College of New York School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture
Moderated by Anthony Vidler, The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union
Introduction to the symposium by Allegra Fuller Snyder (10th Board Member on linked page)

Saturday, September 13
10 am
On Architecture, Design, and Science
Peter Galison, Harvard University
Chuck Hoberman, Designer, Artist, Engineer, and Inventor
Felicity Scott, The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
Anthony Vidler, The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union
Moderated by K. Michael Hays, Whitney Museum of American Art; Harvard University Graduate School of Design

1 pm
On Influence and Contemporary Art
Carol Bove, artist
Pedro Reyes, artist
Elizabeth A. T. Smith, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Victoria Vesna, artist
Moderated by Dana Miller, Whitney Museum of American Art