1.) May 1, 2008 at 7:00 p.m.
Warchitecture, Andrew Herscher, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Architecture, University of Michigan

The term “warchitecture” emerged in Sarajevo as a name for the catastrophic destruction of architecture during the 1992-1996 siege of the city. Blurring the conceptual border between “war” and “architecture,” the term provides a frame to critique dominant accounts of wartime architectural destruction and to bring the interpretive protocols of architecture to bear upon that destruction. But reflection on warchitecture can also open up new ways to examine and understand not only violence against architecture, but also the violence of architecture and the architecture of violence. Where does architecture end and violence begin? How to connect architecture "here" with war "there"? How can a politics against war inform a politics for architecture? These and related questions prompt warchitecture's examination.

2.) May 8, 2008 at 7:00 p.m. 
Nathalie Wolberg
Architect based in Paris, France

French architect Nathalie Wolberg and artist in resident at Centraltrak will discuss her architectural designs that engage space in ways that blur the boundaries between furniture, floor, and wall. Ms. Wolberg’s “Habiter dessus dessous” recalls “the function of the oblique” conceptualized by the French architect-theoretician team Claude Parent and Paul Virilio in the 1960s. Ms. Wolberg’s is a project in which floor modules tip up, open and curve to provide interior space and comfy zones in which to stretch out and relax. A video of Ms. Wolberg’s “Habiter dessus dessous” is part of the inaugural exhibition at Centraltrak, False Space and Time of the Apartment.

3.) May 22,2008 at 7:00 p.m.
Peter Anderson of Anderson Anderson Architecture
San Francisco

Partners and brothers Mark Anderson and Peter Anderson started Anderson Anderson Architecture as a design-build construction company in 1984. Mark and Peter Anderson work together as the lead designers directing all of the firm’s projects, working closely with our clients and collaborators. Working directly with manufacturers and government agencies in the United States and Japan, Anderson Anderson has designed and built numerous prefabrication systems creatively exploring new construction technologies and affordable building methods. Related work on materials and manufacturing systems has extended into various projects in furniture and product design, and in industry consulting on a variety of creative design, marketing, business strategy, manufacturing and construction issues. Coauthored by Anderson and Anderson, Prefab Prototypes: Site-Specific Design for Offsite Construction was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2006. Designed by a team of students from an architectural studio the Andersons taught at the University of California, Berkeley, “Lifebean” and “White Hot Orange” are exhibited in False Space and Time of the Apartment.

4.) “Woman Image Body: Half Lives of the Cyborg Manifesto 25 Years After”
March 7, 2009 

In 1985, Donna J. Haraway published "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the late Twentieth Century." Haraway distilled a new paradigm pf subjectivity that moved beyond traditional paradigms of gender duality and classical humanism. The Manifesto called for an honest embracement of the psycho-corporeal transformations that ensue from technology, the way in which those technologies emancipate us from old mythologies of "human nature" and interpolate into patterns of ecological destruction and the violent matrix of the military industrial complex. Four panelists mediated by Dr. Terranova gathered for discussion: Juliet Flower MacCannell, Irina Aristarkova, Orit Halpern, and Kristin Lucas.

 

5.) “Janus Face, Antipode, or Homologue - Feminism and Conceptualism 1965-75" with Fran Colpitt, Marilyn Waligore, Noah Simbalist, and Eric Stryker - May 23, 2009 : 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

6.) “Digital Sense: Sound, Image, and Object at the Interstices of New Technology” October 17, 2009 Michael Fried, Walter Benn Michaels, WJT Mitchell

7.) “Kinetics of Urban Sprawl: Cybernetics and Urbanism in the 21st Century”
February 20, 2010

Kinetics of Urban Sprawl: Cybernetics and the City in the 21st Century gathered four internationally recognized scholars of urbanism, visual studies, and urban sprawl – Robert Bruegmann, Peter Hales, Mitchell Schwarzer, and Antoine Picon. Together, with Charissa N. Terranova, former Director of Centraltrak, they addressed how we exist with our cars in the collective urban condition of sprawl and, furthermore, how this condition connects us, for better or worse, to a global economy of petrol. It took threefold platform as its premise. The automobile is a creator of: 1.) the urban form known as “sprawl”; 2.) new aesthetic experiences within the field of urban sprawl, and 3.) global relationships that result from urban sprawl. The automobile, roads, and interstate highway system constitute the circulatory system of urban sprawl which, in turn, integrates all Americans into a global economy of petrol acquisition, trade, and war in the name of a freedom that is, at least in part, rooted in the open road and car.

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