The world famous Ms. Hadid of Zaha Hadid Studio in London will be presenting her recent projects on Thursday, May 8th at 5pm in Memorial Hall. She will be receiving an honorary degree from Pratt at its commencement ceremony on May 9.

For more info . . .

A Panel Discussion on Socially Responsible Design with Pablo Castro (Obra Architects), Wesley Janz (Ball State University), Joe Dahmen (MIT), Scott Gerald Shall (President of the International Design Clinic), Cynthia Barton (Director of Strategic Development Architecture for Humanity NY) and Andrew Burdick (Director of Design Research for Architecture for Humanity NY).

The panel will be preceded by a film screening which introduces the thesis proposal.

Organized by: Jessica Wilpon and Haley Lewis, graduate students from Interior Design at Pratt Institute, whose collaborative thesis project addresses the needs of the organization Raising Malawi to build a primary school for the orphanage Home of Hope in Malawi.

For more info. . .

This lecture will discuss some of the history of the integration of architecture and engineering, manifested by the evolution of the master builder into a collaborative team of specialists. Comparisons will be made between the major structures of the past, such as domes and cathedrals, and our modern skyscrapers and long span structures.

Speaker: Mr. Tomasetti and his international firm are renowned for their work on some of the tallest buildings in the world. Thornton Tomasetti has also designed numerous long span sports facilities and currently is engineer of record for Santiago Calatrava's Architectural and engineering designs for the 2,000 ft. high Chicago Spire project.

Mr. Tomasetti's numerous honors and awards include election to the National Academy of Engineering, an honorary doctorate from Manhattan College in 2001, the 2002 ACEC NY Engineer of the year award and the 2006 AIA NY Chapter Award. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia University and NYU, an active author, lecturer, and has coauthored the book Exposed Structures in Building Design.

Organized by: Hellenic American Technical Society

For more info. . .

Michael Webb is an internationally renowned architect and visionary. Webb is one of the prescient and influential founders of Britain's Archigram Group, a team of architects founded 40 years ago that has posed seminal-if outrageous-solutions to provocative problems in urban building and design. Like the other members of Archigram, he has had a tremendous influence on an entire generation of architects, many of whose ideas-technically unfeasible when they first proposed them-are realizable today. Above all, their "sci-fi" assumption that members of a highly mobile society could plug into a sophisticated, worldwide communications network no longer is a fantasy.

Telephone: 718.260.5262

For more info. . .

Colin Purrington, PhD, Swarthmore College

Taking a poster to a conference is an increasingly important part of being a scientist. Unfortunately, this means that everyone else brings a poster, too, so it is increasingly difficult to get noticed at large meetings. Colin Purrington, an evolutionary biologist at Swarthmore College, will present tips on how to make a scientific poster that will be effective, memorable, and, ideally, something you look forward to doing. His presentation will also include a semi-embarrassing group bonding activity that will continue into the wine and cheese session that follows later in the day.

For more info. . .

Michael Portnoy is originally from Bethesda, Maryland, and now lives and works in New York. He is a performance artist, dancer, musician and director of behavior whose work has been on display in museums, art galleries, theaters, and music halls internationally. Including venues such as: Art Unlimited Basel, The Moscow Biennial, P.S. 1/MOMA, The Kitchen, The Sculpture Center, Foksal Gallery Foundation (Warsaw), Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm), Kaaitheater (Brussels), migros museum (Zurich), Le Confort Moderne (Poitiers, France), Kling & Bang Gallery (Reykjavik), The National Review of Live Art (Glasgow), Dexter Sinister, EFA Gallery, Deitch Gallery, White Box, Canada Gallery, ACE Gallery, The Grammy Awards at Radio City Music Hall, ThreeAsFour fashion shows and the washroom at Schiller's.

Contact Ricardo Gonzalez, rgv219@nyu.edu

For more info. . .

Chemistry Colloquium: Protein Evolution - A Reconstructive Approach

Presented by Prof. Dan Tawfik, Weizmann Institute of Science

Hosted by Prof. Virginia Cornish

Meet the speaker at 1:30 in The Miller Seminar Room 328 Havemeyer Hall
Tea & Cookies at 4:00 in The Miller Seminar Room 328 Havemeyer Hall
Seminar at 4:30pm in The Brian Bent Memorial Lecture Hall, Room 209 Havemeyer Hall

Contact Dani Farrell by sending email to mdf2105@columbia.edu or by calling 212-854-2202.

For more info. . .

In the spirit of Norman Bluhm and Frank O'Hara's collaborative Poem-Paintings, on view in New York Cool, New York poets from several generations respond to the atmosphere of camaraderie among artists and poets downtown from 1955 to the present. With John Godfrey (City of Corners, 2008), Lisa Jarnot (Night Scenes, 2008), and Aaron Smith (Blue on Blue Ground, 2005).

Photo ID required at door. Information: 212/998-2596

For more info. . .

Acclaimed historian Chandra Manning will speak about her new book, "What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War." "Manning visited more than two dozen states to comb though archives and libraries for primary source material, mostly diaries and letters of men who fought on both sides in the Civil War, along with more than 100 regimental newspapers. The result is an engagingly written, convincingly argued social history with a pointthat those who did the fighting in the Union and Confederate armies 'plainly identified slavery as the root of the Civil War." Publishers Weekly "Unique, provocative, and immensely valuable is her approach" Booklist Food will be served. Presented by the History Department, the History Club, and the Simon H. Rifkind Center.

Contact: 212-650-6388.

For more info. . .

Geographer and artist Trevor Paglen takes us on a road trip through the world of hidden budgets, state secrets, on covert military bases, and more, guiding us through a landscape that military and intelligence insiders call the "black world." Over the course of his talk, Paglen leads us from "nonexistent" Air Force and CIA installations in the Nevada desert to secret prisons in Afghanistan and to a collection of even more obscure "black sites" startlingly close to home. Using hundreds of images he has produced and collected over the course of his work, Paglen shows how the black world's internal contradictions give rise to a peculiar visual, aesthetic, and epistemological grammar with which to think about the contemporary moment.

*This event is free with Museum admission but tickets are required.

For more info. . .

Professor Seyla Benhabib, Yale University

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and Director of its Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics. Professor Benhabib was the President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2006-07.

She is the author of Critique, Norm and Utopia. A Study of the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (1986); Situating the Self. Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (1992; winner of the National Educational Association's best book of the year award) ; together with Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell and Nancy Fraser, Feminism as Critique (1994); The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996; reissued in 2002); The Claims of Culture. Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, (2002) and most recently, The Rights of Others. Aliens, Citizens and Residents (2004), which won the Ralph Bunche award of the American Political Science Association (2005) and the North American Society for Social Philosophy award (2004). Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations, with responses by Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig and Will Kymlicka (2006).

For more info. . .

This workshop brings together string theorists and cosmologists to discuss new ideas and observations relevant for understanding the universe from very early times until today.

Sergei Dubovsky, Harvard; Rachel Bean, Cornell; Steve Allen, Stanford; Nemanja Kaloper, University of California, Davis

Agenda
11am - 12pm
Steve Allen, Stanford
Cosmological Constraints from X-ray Studies of Galaxy Clusters
12 - 12:15pm
Break
12:15 - 1:15pm
Rachel Bean, Cornell
1:15 - 3:15pm
Lunch
3:15 - 4:15pm
Sergei Dubovsky, Harvard
Superluminal Travel in Two Dimensions
4:15 - 4:30pm
Break
4:30 - 5:30pm
Nemanja Kaloper, University of California, Davis

Abstracts
Cosmological Constraints from X-ray Studies of Galaxy Clusters
Steve Allen, Stanford

X-ray observations of galaxy clusters provide one of our most powerful probes of cosmology. I will discuss the latest results from two independent experiments based on X-ray cluster studies. The first uses measurements of the baryonic mass fraction in the largest, dynamically relaxed clusters. This method, like type Ia supernovae studies, measures distance as a function of redshift and traces the acceleration of the Universe directly. It also provides a tight constraint on the mean matter density. The second experiment uses observations of the growth of cosmic structure, as manifested in the evolution of the X-ray luminosity function of galaxy clusters. It leads to tight constraints on the amplitude of mass fluctuations in the Universe, and new constraints on dark energy. I will emphasize the allowances for systematic uncertainties incorporated into these experiments and place the results in the context of other current cosmological data. I also will comment on the prospects for improving these results over the next few years.

Lunch will be provided

For more info. . .

The Columbia Astronomy Department hosts star-gazing nights in the observatory on the roof of Pupin twice a month. We begin each evening with an introductory level science talk. At our concluding night of the spring semester, Professor David Helfand, chair of the astronomy department, will discuss climate change.

Summary:
On the subject of Global Warming, everyone is finally paying attention, but misinformation is rampant. I will provide a dispassionate analysis of the situation as it is understood by the best science of today, categorizing the influences on Earth's climate as 1) those which are predictable, measured, and understood (e.g., changes in Earth's orbit), 2) those which are predictable, measured, and only partially understood (e.g., the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere), and 3) those which are unpredictable, poorly measured, and not well understood at all (e.g., ocean circulation). I place the problem in the context of the highly accurate measurements we have collected on the long-term history of past climate, and emphasize how uncertainties arise in predictions of future climate as a consequence of complicated feedback loops in the climate system. I briefly assess the likely impact of climate change on ourselves and our grandchildren, and, in what I anticipate to be a lively question and answer period, address the issue of whether anything can reasonable be done to regulate the Earth's climate.

Telescopic viewing on the roof will follow the lecture, 8-10 pm if weather permits.

Contact Cameron Hummels: outreach-admin@astro.columbia.edu / 212-854-6864.

Website: http://www.astro.columbia.edu/outreach/

For more info. . .

Museum as Hub presents: Theodore Hughes: Everyday Life, Violence, and the State of Exception.

As a "camptown" (kijich'on), Dongducheon enters a constellation of narratives figuring South Korea-US relations as marked by neocolonialism, militarism, Cold War developmentalism, sex work, and commodity fetishism. Paying attention to the ways in which the Museum as Hub exhibition "Dongducheon: A Walk to Remember, A Walk to Envision" works to unpack the allegorical gesture that has informed this constellation for much of South Korean history, Theodore Hughes examines the relationship between violence and the everyday in Dongducheon.

Theodore Hughes, Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Korean Studies in the Humanities (Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University), received his Ph.D. in modern Korean literature from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002. His current research interests include coloniality; proletarian literature; collaboration and race; national division and sovereignty; Cold War visual culture.

*This event is free with Museum admission but tickets are required.

For more info. . .

Limited edition furniture is making its way to museums and auction houses. Learn more about this recent trend. David Revere McFadden, chief curator of the Museum of Arts and Design will be joined on the panel by Dr. Barry R. Harwood, curator of Decorative Arts, The Brooklyn Museum; Dave Alhadeff, owner and creator, The Future Perfect; Amy Lau, principal, Amy Lau Design; for a panel discussion moderated by Fred Bernstein, senior contributing editor, Metropolitan Home.

For more info. . .

For Show/ Tell 08 the Goethe-Institut New York is pleased to present an artist talk with German artists and partners Rosa Loy and Neo Rauch. The two painters from the renowned New Leipzig School will meet the New York-based curator/writer couple Sabine Russ and Gregory Volk to discuss which challenges, opportunities and problems might arise as a result of living and working in the same field. What kind of inspiration and impulses does their partnership provide for both of them?

Rosa Loy is one of the few female artists of the New Leipzig School. Her work has been widely exhibited in Europe and the U.S. Rosa Loy’s new solo exhibition opens at André Schlechtriem on May 10.

Neo Rauch’s monumental paintings have been exhibited extensively in Europe and the U.S. Neo Rauch’s new solo exhibition opens at David Zwirner on May 12.

Sabine Russ is a German writer and curator, who organized several exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe together with Gregory Volk. He is a curator and critic, who regularly contributes to Art in America, Parkett and Sculpture.

For more info. . .

Sara Seager, Ellen Swallow Richards Associate Professor of Planetary Science and Associate Professor of Physics at MIT, researches the atmospheres and interiors of extrasolar planets, especially the subset of exoplanets called transiting planets, which pass in front of their stars as seen from Earth. Transiting planets have immeasurably changed the study of exoplanets because their physical properties can be now be routinely measured; this development has accelerated the race to find exoplanets that might be habitable.

For more info. . .

George Katsiaficas, Ashanti Alston Omowali & James Ponce

Continuing our year-long events series on the 40th anniversary of 1968, we will look at the impact of the Black Panther Party, which inspired thousands to join their movement to transform "the system." Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party will offer a fresh and realistic recounting of the tumultuous history of what arguably became the most significant revolutionary organization in the US during the late 20th century.

Ashanti Alston Omowali is an anarchist activist, speaker, and writer, and former member of the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, and spent more than a decade in prison after government forces captured him and the official court system convicted him of armed robbery. Alston is the former northeast coordinator for Critical Resistance, a current co-chair of the National Jericho Movement (to free U.S. political prisoners), a member of pro-Zapatista people-of-color U.S.-based Estacion Libre, and is on the board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. George Katsiaficas has been active in social movements since 1969 when he participated in the anti-Vietnam movement. A target of the FBI's COINTELPRO program (Counterintelligence), he was honored to be classified "Priority 1 ADEX" meaning in the event of a national emergency, people like him were to be immediately arrested. After living in Berlin for 1 1/2 years and learning first-hand about the autonomous movement there, he wrote about that movement (The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life). He is the author of several other books including the classic: The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968.

$6/$10/$15 Free for Brecht Forum Subscribers.

For more info. . .

The construction of Moynihan Station is the single most critical civic project planned for New York City this decade. Penn Station, this country's busiest transportation center, is overcapacity and inefficient. A modern, state-of-the-art train station would revitalize the surrounding district and be the most effective catalyst for development on the Far West Side of Manhattan. What will it take to fully realize Senator Moynihan's vision?

Panelists include: Kent Barwick, president, Municipal Art Society; Richard Ravitch, principal, Ravitch Rice & Company LLC; Richard L. Brodsky, assemblyman, New York State Assembly; Anna Hayes Levin, chair, Community Board 4; and Daniel A. Biederman, president, 34th Street Partnership. Moderator: Charles Bagli, reporter, The New York Times.

$15, $12 MAS members. Reservations and prepayment required.

For more info. . .

Bonnie Yochelson, curator and author of Berenice Abbott: Changing New York, and Daniel Czitrom, Professor of History, Mount Holyoke College, offer a fresh look at the Progressive Era social reformer, journalist, and pioneer photographer who publicized the conditions of the desperately poor in turn-of-the-century New York. A deeply contradictory figure, Riis was a conservative activist and skillful entertainer, an ingenious publicist driven by moral passion, and a revolutionary photographer whose relationship to the camera was diffident at best. Book signing to follow.

Contact: 212 817 8474

For more info. . .

Artists Speak: Conversations on Contemporary Art with Glenn D. Lowry
Icon Culture: Lingua Franca for a Global Culture

Icons are a language of their own in contemporary society, transcending linguistic boundaries with simple graphic imagery. In this program, Bruce Mau and Matt Mullican discuss how they use iconic language as a means of communication.

Tickets ($10; members $8; students, seniors, and staff of other museums $5) can be purchased online, or at the Museum at the lobby information desk and the Film desk.

For more info. . .

In May, FIAF launches World Nomads, a series that examines the cross-cultural exchange of ideas, artistic expression, and style. This transcultural journey begins in contemporary Africa bringing artists together for engaging programs considering Africa's cultural impact on France and the rest of the world.

The modern metropolis as cosmopolitan utopia, the savvy city dweller as cross-cultural flaneur--these are the dreams Claude Grunitzky, acclaimed editor of Trace magazine. Now he brings them to FIAF for a night of inspired conversation. Grunitzky will discuss his vision of urban space as a place where diversity coalesces rather than collides--and where cultural borrowings gradually erode the edges of difference to forge a world of true universality.

For more info. . .