Nils Norman, The Homerton, Playscape Multiple Struggle Niche, 2005, preview card. Via Archinect.

Alternative Architecture and Outlaw Design
Nils Norman and Eva Diaz
Cabinet - 300 Nevins St, Brooklyn NY
7pm Friday 24 April 2009

This Friday at Cabinet's Brooklyn event space, Nils Norman and Eva Diaz will be talking about Buckminster Fuller's lasting influence on contemporary architecture's encounter with housing crises and homelessness. Displaced from this influence today is much of the ideological underpinning that once informed and nurtured a resistant and pioneering spirit in both culture and politics among the intellectual malcontents of the Cold War's first few decades. This spirit or ideology today is today sometimes substituted by provisional, tactical and information-oriented engagements made necessary by an often deeply managed (commercially, legally) landscape. The talk will anticipate Norman's upcoming collaboration at SculptureCEnter, The University of Trash. From the press release:

Many people today are stimulated by Buckminster Fuller's post-war dome technologies, as well as other 1960s and 1970s-era shelter designs, to radically rethink architectural structures, both as a practical solution to urban housing crises and as a key historical trope of innovative "guerrilla" architecture. The difference today: gone is the frontiersman logic of back-to-the-land, drop-off-the-grid, atomized micro-environmentalism... What enters instead is a proposition of sculptural structures as temporary interventions in urban sites, of kiosk production and shelter-information display hybrids.