Global Design New York University: Design goes Global at NYU

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Design goes Global at NYU

Three Gallatin faculty members have founded a new research group, GLOBAL Design New York University, to bring together designers, educators and innovators in architecture, urban design and landscape architecture. GLOBAL, which stands for Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape, was organized by Peder Anker, Louise Harpman and Mitchell Joachim, who together launched GLOBAL Design NYU’s new Web site.

According to the group’s mission, “We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation.”

To that end, the group has organized the upcoming symposium and exhibition, GLOBAL Design: Elsewhere Envisioned, taking place at NYU Gallatin from May 25 to June 25, 2011. The event is part of an ongoing, multi-year project in which events will be planned for NYU study-abroad sites in the future, including London, Berlin, Shanghai and Abu Dhabi.

VISIT:

Peder Anker
Louise Harpman
Mitchell Joachim

MISSION

Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is "as close to the beyond as to things near" when we evoke "our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere."