Parsons presents Paul Goldberger, Pulitzer Prize winning architecture critic, in conversation with Parsons Dean Joel Towers. The discussion centers on Goldberger's most recent publications, Why Architecture Matters and Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture.
Paul Goldberger, Joseph Urban Chair of Design and Architecture at The New School, is also the architecture critic of The New Yorker and the former architecture critic of The New York Times. Joel E. Towers is the Dean of Parsons The New School For Design and associate professor of Architecture and Sustainable Design at the school.
Bio
Paul Goldberger
Paul Goldberger has been The New Yorker's architecture critic since 1997. He holds the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture at the New School. His books include "The City Observed: New York" and "Up from Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York." His most recent books, "Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture," a collection of his New Yorker columns, and "Why Architecture Matters," came out last year.
Joel Towers
The New School has appointed Joel Towers as the Interim Dean of Parsons The New School for Design. Towers came to The New School in 2004 in a new role as director of Sustainable Design and Urban Ecology. In 2006, he became the inaugural director of the Tishman Environment and Design Center and Associate Provost for Environmental Studies. He helped to design the new university-wide Environmental Studies degrees that are now jointly offered by Parsons and Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. This innovative undergraduate program goes beyond natural ecology and resource conservation, emphasizing urban ecosystems, sustainable design, and public policy.
Prior to joining The New School, Towers taught in Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, developing cross-disciplinary teaching and research focused on sustainability and urban ecology in relation to urban design and architecture. A practicing architect for the past two decades, Joel co-founded the firm Sislian, Rothstein and Towers (SR+T Architects) with Karla Rothstein. For several years the firm maintained offices in New York and Berlin. Today the work generated through SR+T continues in new collaborations that extend the realm of traditional practice into construction, materials development, real estate development, and sustainable design. Joel received his Masters in Architecture from Columbia University and his B.S. in Architecture from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. The practice of architecture emphasizes spatial relationships, orientation, the support of activities to be carried out within a designed environment, and the arrangement and visual rhythm of structural elements, as opposed to the design of structural systems themselves (seecivil engineering). Appropriateness, uniqueness, a sensitive and innovative response to functional requirements, and a sense of place within its surrounding physical and social context distinguish a built environment as representative of a culture's architecture. See alsobuilding construction.
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