Join Mitch McEwen01 (M.Arch '06) and Ward Verbakel 02(MsAUD '04) at Studio-X New York next Tuesday, September 20 at 6:30 pm for a discussion about how we understand and operate in the city. Entitled Designregions/Designlocal: The Urban Ugly and Committing Architecture, the event has been coordinated by GSAPP faculty members Moji Baratloo and Justin Moore (MsAUD '04). Read more here03 for a brief written by Ward Verbakel (MsAUD '04) questioning the meaning of urban design education; and a related recent editorial04 by Mitch McEwen (M.Arch '06) on the death of Manhattanism. (We didn't have an image for this event but, curiously, a Google image search of the title comes up with this image of the London riots, which we thought was sort of appropriate.) Read more about the participants below: 

"Waste and lifestyle" in the regional and urban context raises important questions about what we can do as designers to understand and operate in the city. Architects and urban designers Mitch McEwen and Ward Verbakel will discuss their work, which ranges from identifying acts of war and intervention to the re-taking of peripheral and underutilized spaces.

Mitch McEwen, Principal of A. Conglomerate and founder of SUPERFRONT, is a recipient of the The New York State Council on the Arts 2010 Independent Projects awards for Architecture, Planning and Design. The Akademie Schloss Solitude has granted her a residency fellowship in architecture for 2012-2013. Her architectural work has been published in ARTnews, Architectural Record and the New York Times. Her articles on various aspects of urbanism and critical practice have published in SLUM Lab magazine, Domus, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society at Columbia University. Since founding SUPERFRONT in January 2008, she has curated more than fifteen exhibits and published 4 exhibition catalogues. She has taught as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP and Instructor at NJIT College of Architecture and Design. She holds an M.Arch from Columbia GSAPP and A.B. from Harvard. 

Ward Verbakel co-founded plusofficearchitects in 2006. This multidisciplinary practice is based in Brussels and quickly became one of Belgium’s promising design studio’s, working on various design projects ranging from landscape urbanism and master planning to residential and cultural projects. Ward is currently developing the masterplan for a cluster of towns around Lommel, the redevelopment strategy for the Durance valley in France and the reconversion of an 11ha railyard in Essen. The design team he led, was one of five finalists for the Greenway linear park, part of the London 2012 Olympic park. Ward has thought graduate design studio’s at GSAPP Columbia University, KULeuven and the European Master of Urbanism. Recently Ward has joined the editorial board of A+, Belgian’s national Architecture magazine and was a jury member for the national architectural awards.