Living City Exhibition Opening, with DeeDee Gordon and Mark Hansen

Van Alen Institute presents

LIVING CITY: A PUBLIC INTERFACE TO AIR QUALITY IN NEW YORK
An Exhibition by New York Prize Fellows David Benjamin and Soo-In Yang

with DEEDEE GORDON AND MARK HANSEN: In Conversation
From Trend-Spotting to Environmental Testing: Communicating through Distributed Networks

Tuesday, December 11, 2007
6:30-8:30pm
at Van Alen Institute
30 West 22nd Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10010
212-924-7000
[email protected]

Van Alen Institute is pleased to announce an exhibition by New York Prize Fellows David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang. In the future, walls will breathe and buildings will talk to one another. Construction materials and systems that have been inert for thousands of years will respond in real-time to the dynamic conditions of their surrounding environments and to a larger network of data. Architecture will come to life and create a Living City.

Living City is a large-scale installation of a building skin designed to breathe in response to air quality. During their tenure as Van Alen Institute Fellows, Benjamin and Yang have been developing one of the first full-scale architecture prototypes to link local responses in a building to a distributed network of sensors throughout the city. The prototype will be based at Van Alen Institute’s public gallery and will communicate wirelessly with air quality sensors around New York City, moving in response to information the sensors collect. Using the city as a research lab, Benjamin and Yang propose an architecture that functions as a public interface to urban air quality, creating a platform for an ecology of building skins where individual buildings receive, share and respond to data as part of a collective network. For more information on Living City, please visit www.thelivingcity.net.

Following a presentation by Benjamin and Yang, DeeDee Gordon (Look-Look, Inc.) and Mark Hansen (Center for Embedded Network Sensing, UCLA) will be featured In Conversation to discuss social networking intelligence, distributed sensor networks, and new developments in the communication of cultural, environmental and scientific data. Van Alen Institute's ‘In Conversation’ series pairs diverse practitioners in spontaneous, unscripted dialogue to bridge work in contemporary architecture and urbanism with other disciplines
that engage the public realm.

This program is free and open to the registered public; please RSVP to [email protected] by Friday, December 7, 2007.

The Living City exhibition will be on view at Van Alen Institute December 11, 2007 - January 18, 2008. Living City is additionally supported by the Graham Foundation and the Living Architecture Lab at Columbia University.

About The Living
David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang are co-founders and principals of The Living (www.thelivingnewyork.com). The New York City-based practice emphasizes open-source research and design, seeking collaboration both within and outside the field of architecture, and viewing each project as part of larger threads of experimentation and construction. Work by The Living has been exhibited at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry and the Innovation Lab in Copenhagen; has received the Architectural League's Young Architects Forum award in 2006 and three separate finalist prizes from the Metropolis Magazine Next Generation Design competition; and has appeared in many publications, including Life Size (Columbia Books of Architecture, 2007), a non-monograph about the firm's work, and Transmaterial (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006). Benjamin graduated from Harvard with a BA in Social Studies and played in the rock band Push Kings. Yang graduated from Yonsei University with a BE in Architectural Engineering and managed the construction of apartment complexes in Seoul. Benjamin and Yang both received their Masters of Architecture from Columbia University. They currently teach at Pratt Institute and Columbia University, where they are co-directors of the Living Architecture Lab.

About DeeDee Gordon
DeeDee Gordon, renowned youth culture expert and Co-Founder of youth marketing company Look-Look, Inc., has been at the forefront of youth culture and trend research for over 15 years. While working as Director of Research and Product Development for ad agency Lambesis, Gordon and colleague Sharon Lee broke new ground in the standards of youth market research by creating the famed L Report, the first national marketing research report to track trend diffusion among youth. In 1999, Gordon and Lee became pioneers in the field of research by taking youth culture research “on-line” and co-founded Look-Look, Inc. a one-of-a-kind research, marketing and trend on-line consulting company specializing in youth culture. Today Look-Look has the largest global community of 14-35 year-old youth who report on their own culture. Look-Look’s proprietary panel and database technology allow them to exceed the capabilities of competing marketing companies by maintaining a constant 2-way dialogue with trendsetting and mainstream young people from around the world. Clientele such as Coca Cola, Mercedes, Calvin Klein, Nike, Inc., Unilever and Sony Pictures come to Look-Look for expertise and instant access to information on global youth culture. As co-president at Look-Look, Inc., Gordon oversees all research analysis, product development and creative direction for client accounts and Look-Look consumer products, and with co-president Lee, she directs the marketing solutions of the company. For more information visit http://www.look-look.com/.

About Mark Hansen
Mark Hansen is currently Associate Professor of Statistics at UCLA, where he has appointments in the Departments of Design|Media Art and Electrical Engineering. He is also a Co-Principal Investigator at the Center for Embedded Network Sensing, and was previously a member of the Technical Staff in the Statistics and Data Mining Research Department of Bell Laboratories. Hansen’s research focuses on the applications and behaviors of large, complex data streams, and he describes his work as “necessarily collaborative,” drawing on fields as diverse as information theory, numerical analysis, computer science, and media art. Collaborations with New York artist Ben Rubin include “Listening Post,” an award winning multimedia art installation designed to convey the magnitude and diversity of online communication, and the forthcoming “Moveable Type,” an artwork commissioned for the ground-floor lobby of The New York Times Building. For more information visit http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~cocteau/.

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Van Alen Institute is an independent nonprofit architectural organization whose mission is to promote inquiry into the processes that shape the design of the public realm. For over a century, the Institute has cultivated a fellowship of architecture and design practitioners and scholars, awarded excellence in design, and fostered dialogue about architecture as a public practice. Today, as conventionally defined fields of knowledge give way to new disciplines and alternative methodologies, Van Alen Institute reclaims its legacy as an architectural institute that is dedicated to critical inquiry surrounding contemporary forms of public space and new configurations of spatial practice. The Institute develops and presents programs that inform debate and advance design through competitions and fellowships, related forums, publications and exhibitions. For more information on the Van Alen Institute New York Prize Fellowship, visit www.vanalen.org/nyprize.