FRINGE: New Centers for Architecture & Urbanism
The FRINGE is an ambiguous and ubiquitous patchwork of zones forming a wide range of territorial landscapes that can be characterized as neither distinctly urban nor distinctly rural. Imbued with narratives driven by unrelenting and perpetual urbanization, the FRINGE serves as a global engine for urban growth, a site for extractive industries, a territory for agricultural and technological productions, and a continuous land supply for architectural production and the expansion of urbanites. Formerly understood as peripheral, these rural-urban zones constitute new conceptual centers for architecture and urbanism, from generating innovative and adaptive material usage to redefining spatial adjacency between agricultural and urban landscapes. Emerging as the predominant context for current and future urban development, the FRINGE embodies contradicting adjacencies that are situated between the local-specific and the urban-generic and outside the preconceived binaries of urban versus rural, natural versus manmade, or remote versus connected.

Containing some of the world's most intensely altered rural-urban contexts, East and Southeast Asia have provided a fertile seedbed for research on global FRINGE architecture and urbanism. Bringing together innovative design and research through the lens of the built environment, this symposium questions: How do the material and technological changes brought about by urbanization collide with the spatial, cultural, and social practices of the rural? How do such meetings create or alter the special conditions of agency and interconnection, from the digital to the traditional, from the informal to the infrastructural, within the rural-urban?

Kicking off with a keynote lecture and the first panel in Beijing on March 2 (co-hosted with the Cornell China Center), the symposium will continue with a second panel at the Milstein Hall on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York, on March 3. An accompanying exhibition will be on view in the Bibliowicz Family Gallery from February 28 to March 23. The symposium and the accompanying exhibition aim to unpack the FRINGE's spatial, ecological, and technological capacities to reveal innovative design strategies that strive to be more environmentally conscious, socially equitable, and architecturally adaptive.

The Preston H. Thomas series is funded through a gift to Cornell's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning from Ruth and Leonard B. Thomas of Auburn, New York, in memory of their son, Preston. The symposium events are free and open to the public.

The Beijing panel of the symposium is co-hosted and co-sponsored by the generous support of the Cornell China Center.

Organized by Architecture Assistant Professor Leslie Lok; coordinated by Design Teaching Fellow Hanxi Wang. Exhibition assistant Jialiang (Hunter) Huang; Augmented Reality interface support by Yichen Jia.