CASSIM SHEPARD
Urban Omnibus
Date: Saturday 9.19
Start Time: 4:00pm
Location: Rm. 204, Barney building
Urban Omnibus is on online curio-cabinet of design projects – innovative, interdisciplinary and in the public interest – each of which takes the built environment of New York City as laboratory and playground.
Everything around us is designed, yet the channels to communicate design thinking are increasingly narrow. Many of the most inspiring ideas, opinions and projects never manage to bubble up into a city-wide conversation. Curating a multi-platform selection of design thinking and practice – which includes live meet-ups in addition to the online presentation of video and audio, text and image, interactive maps and good-old fashioned essays – just might encourage greater intimacy with the choices that shape the physical form of the city.
In this workshop, we’ll discuss the premises, process and prospects of shining a light on design innovation in the urban landscape of New York, reflecting on the relationships between editorial/curatorial practice, urban exploration and the benefit of first-person work process narratives.
Urban Omnibus is an online project of the Architectural League to create a new kind of conversation about design and New York City. We gather and deliver the insights of journalists, architects, planners, designers, artists, activists, scholars and citizens. The Omnibus features multi-media content to showcase design innovation, critical analysis and local expertise across a broad range of topics and locales, creating bridges between various communities of interest. Urban Omnibus makes vivid the processes and possibilities shaping New York. Our goal is to increase understanding of the city we have and encourage ideas that can lead to a more inclusive, more sustainable, more beautiful city that could be.
Cassim Shepard is the founding director of Urban Omnibus, an online project of The Architectural League of New York. He produces non-fiction media about cities, buildings and places. He has lectured at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India and the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics, and exhibited work at the Musee de la civilisation, Quebec, the Cineteca di Bologna, the Salone del Mobile, Milan, and the Venice Architecture Biennale 2006, while working indefinitely on an infinitely expandable video archive of border imagery begun as an artist-in-residence at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, Utah. He lives in New York City.
