October 8, 2011

I Meditate NY has created an urban meditation series for the BMW Guggenheim Lab to be held every Saturday at 10 am from August 6 until October 15. This series introduces meditation to empower participants to contemplate what “comfort” means to them. It provides a technique for examining the inner environment to enhance the outer environment. Sessions aim to challenge comfort zones and provide a tool to create sustainable comfort: comfort that comes from within and goes with you. Each session includes an introduction to meditation.

An Archtober event

Image: courtesy I Meditate NY

To learn more about I Meditate NY visit: http://www.imeditateny.org.

Sprawl dominates American cities. Its monotonous, low-density, single-use, auto-dependent landscapes are making us sick and endangering the health of the planet. Can Anywhere, USA, be fixed? Join June Williamson, co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia, for a hands-on repair workshop. Through images and sketching, learn how to apply “retrofitting” tactics to build healthier, happier, and more sustainable suburbs.

Image: courtesy June Williamson 

Small, portable computers are an integral part of our lives. With the ubiquity of wireless connectivity, they are integrated into our physical environment. If we imagine our future city as a computer in the open air, how will citizens take part in programming and improving their environment? What opportunities will this present for addressing some of the pressing challenges of today? How will this catalyze innovation, promote equity, or impact governance?

In this workshop, examples of projects that explore this future scenario will be shown, followed by an interactive exercise for designing real-time urban services. Led by Assaf Biderman, associate director of the MIT SENSEable City Lab.

Photo: courtesy Assaf Biderman

Sprawl: the uncontrolled spread of urban development into neighboring regions. Explore this multifaceted concept with June Williamson, author of Retrofitting Suburbia, as she moderates a discussion on the history, development, and future of sprawl with panelists Rachel Heiman, an urban anthropologist at the New School specializing in the comforts and anxieties of the American middle class; Galina Tachieva, an urban planner and author of The Sprawl Repair Manual; and Christoph Gielen, a photographer exploring sprawl and the intersection of art and environmental politics through photographic aerial studies of infrastructure.

Photo: by Christoph Gielen

Lab Team member Charles Montgomery and design anthropologist Michael Prokopow (Ontario College of Art and Design) lead audience members on an Internet surf toward the city of our desires. Give us your favorite real or virtual place. We’ll surf there together and explore the architectures of design and desire in our own minds.

Photo used by permission under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) License from FredMikeRudy