Displacements_People: Designing for the Refugee Crisis

FREE ADMISSION – RSVP here
1.5 CEUs available _ Wine and hors d’oeuvres reception
 
WHEN:  Thursday, February 23rd - 6:30pm to 8:30pm
WHERE: Center for Architecture - AIANY, 536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY
WHAT: Displacements_People: Designing for the Global Refugee Crisis
This current moment of unprecedented migration--the flows of people displaced by conflict, economic need, and environmental degradation--urgently demands a response from architects, planners, artists, and policy makers.  At a time when many institutions are confronting how to, or sadly, whether to confront the issues of global population displacement, the design community continues to engage with this issue through analysis, advocacy, documentation and design.
 
WHO:
Speakers:
T. Alexander Aleinikoff: Former Deputy High Commissioner, Office of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Sean Anderson: Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art; Organizer of "Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter" (2016) 
Alfredo Brillembourg:  Founder and Partner, Urban-Think Tank
Eliza Montgomery: Designer, Ennead + Ennead Lab, "Rethinking Refugee Communities"
Robert Pietrusko: Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Geospatial Representation + Critical Cartography, Collaborator on EXIT

Moderator:
Farzana Gandhi, AIA: Department Chair/Professor of Architecture, New York Institute of Technology and Principal, Farzana Gandhi Design Studio
 
About Global Dialogues' 2017 Theme:
Displacements
Contemporary global design practice is immersed in a constant state of flux, exchange, and displacement -- the movement of people, resources, geographic designations and boundaries, money, ideas and social / cultural understanding.   These movements are impelled by political or environmental changes, world conflicts, global market and policy shifts, and generational changes in interaction through technology, among other factors.   Within this push and pull, “displacement” evokes simultaneity and reciprocity between two competing conditions, one emerging in influence and one diminishing or being offset.  As architects, we are both an active part of these flows and engaged in negotiating, mitigating, fostering and accommodating them. This year’s Global Dialogues looks at a broad and diverse range of urgent sites for engagement by the global design community through the lens of “Displacement."
 
Organizers:
AIANY Global Dialogues Committee
Chairs: 
Elie Gamburg AIA + Leed AP, Director - KPF
Benjamin Gilmartin AIA, Partner - Diller Scofidio + Renfro