Karrie Jacobs: The City Beautiful All Over Again
Tuesday 23 October, 2012
6 - 8pm, $0/Rsvp
School of Visual Arts, Design Criticism
136 West 21 Street, Floor 2
The last time that we Americans tried to make our cities beautiful was around the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The City Beautiful movement and disciples of the Ecole des Beaux Arts seeded our cities with examples of monumental splendor. Then beauty, in the context of the American city, went a way for roughly a century. Now, American cities are embracing beauty again though not through a monolithic, top down strategy. Rather, cities are being made more beautiful incrementally, in exactly the unmethodical way that earlier generations would have decried as inharmonious. A language of urban beauty that is distinctively American has begun to emerge.
Karrie Jacobs has written one-and-a-half books: The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home, published by Viking in 2006 and Angry Graphics, written with Steven Heller, published by Gibbs Smith in 1992. She’s a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine where she writes a monthly column, “America,†about how ideas and strategies in architecture and design play out on the landscape. She’s also a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. She was the founding editor-in-chief of Dwell. Prior to launching Dwell in fall of 2000, she was the architecture critic of New York Magazine, and in the early 1990s, was the founding executive editor of Benetton’s Colors Magazine. She’s also a faculty member of the Design Criticism graduate program at the School of Visual Arts where she sends students out onto the streets of New York City so they can learn for themselves the differences between a good building and a bad building.
Karrie Jacobs has written one-and-a-half books: The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home, published by Viking in 2006 and Angry Graphics, written with Steven Heller, published by Gibbs Smith in 1992. She’s a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine where she writes a monthly column, “America,†about how ideas and strategies in architecture and design play out on the landscape. She’s also a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. She was the founding editor-in-chief of Dwell. Prior to launching Dwell in fall of 2000, she was the architecture critic of New York Magazine, and in the early 1990s, was the founding executive editor of Benetton’s Colors Magazine. She’s also a faculty member of the Design Criticism graduate program at the School of Visual Arts where she sends students out onto the streets of New York City so they can learn for themselves the differences between a good building and a bad building.