Thursday 27 May, 6 pm, CAC Reading Room

Kazys Varnelis is the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. The Network Architecture Lab is a research entity dedicated to investigaing how computation, communications, and changing social networks impact architecture and the city. Over the last quarter century as technology, economics, the public sphere, culture, urbanism—even subjectivity—have mutated, the network has emerged as our dominant cultural logic. The Netlab seeks to understand the consequences of these changes and develop appropriate responses.

During its first two years, the Netlab brought to completion a series of analytic projects. Published by ACTAR, the Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles uncovers a radically changed urban landscape of out-of-control complexity. Using Los Angeles as a case study, fifteen commissioned essays examine the contemporary city at three scales of landscape, fabric, and objects. Networked Publics, done in collaboration with the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California and published by MIT Press, explores how new and maturing networking technologies reconfigure the way that we interact with content, media sources, other individuals and groups, and the world that surrounds us. Netlab director Kazys Varnelis also edited The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews by Robert A. M. Stern, an oral history of the twentieth-century architect produced by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for American Architecture.

www.varnelis.net; http://www.networkarchitecturelab.org