The 2023 Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium Exhibition highlights the work of leading creative experts around the world that explores and integrates regional cultural, material, technological, and spatial practices in the rural-urban territories of East and Southeast Asia. Through a collection of visual materials and augmented reality (AR) experiences, the exhibition provides an immersive and interactive experience of works that challenge preconceived notions of the rural-urban binary and propose exciting potentials for rethinking construction technologies, sustainability, and citizen agency in the built environment.

The exhibition features the work of:

1+1>2 Architects, Amateur Architecture Studio, ArchiUnion, Bangkok Project Studio, DnA Design and Architecture, Drawing Architecture Studio, Future Cities Laboratory, Rural-Urban Building Innovation Laboratory, Rural Urban Framework, Studio Anna Heringer, SUP Atelier

Learn more about the 2023 Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium "FRINGE: New Centers for Architecture and Urbanism."

Bartels World Affairs Lecture In this year's Bartels lecture from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, former president of Costa Rica Carlos Alvarado Quesada shares how conservation and sustainability are crucial for preserving democracy around the world. Costa Rica is one of the most biodiverse spots on the planet, with more than one-quarter of the nation's land protected in parks and preserves. As Costa Rica's leader from 2018 to 2022, Alvarado proposed a challenge for his country and the world: to make Costa Rica a decarbonized nation by 2050. During his visit to Cornell, Alvarado explores some of the questions that guided his administration: What roles do democracy and governance play in shaping environmental policies at the local, national, and global levels? And how can we meet the basic needs of the world’s ever-growing human population—equitably and democratically—without sacrificing the health of the planet and its other inhabitants? A reception with refreshments will follow the lecture. Lecture: 6:00–7:30 p.m. | Alice Statler AuditoriumReception: 7:30–8:30 p.m. | Park AtriumFree ticket required for in-person attendance. Reserve your ticket for the lecture and/or reception today! Join the lecture virtually by registering at eCornell. *** How did President Alvarado's policies protect Costa Rica's environment? Read a Bartels explainer by the Lab of O's Viviana Ruiz-Gutierrez. *** About Carlos Alvarado Quesada Carlos Alvarado Quesada was Costa Rica's 48th president, serving from 2018 until 2022. He was Costa Rica's youngest president in a century, taking office at age 38. Representing the Citizens' Action Party (PAC), Alvarado previously served as minister of labor and social security. Alvarado received the 2022 Planetary Leadership Award from the National Geographic Society for his commitment and action to protect the ocean. He accepted on behalf of his country the 2019 Champion of the Earth Award, the United Nations' highest environmental honor. A writer and political scientist, Alvarado is currently Professor of Practice of Diplomacy at Tufts University's Fletcher School in Massachusetts. *** About the Bartels World Affairs Lecture The Bartels World Affairs Lecture is a signature event of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Part of Einaudi's work on democratic threats and resilience, this year's lecture is cosponsored by Einaudi's Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. The Einaudi Center’s flagship event brings distinguished international figures to campus each academic year to speak on global topics and meet with Cornell faculty and students, particularly undergraduates. The lecture and related events are made possible by the generosity of Henry E. Bartels ’48 and Nancy Horton Bartels ’48.

FRINGE: New Centers for Architecture and Urbanism - 2023 Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium

Beijing Panel — Thursday, March 2 (Ithaca) | Friday, March 3 (Beijing)

In-Person & Livestream Webinar

Cornell China Center | 1208 Beijing IFC Tower B

8 p.m. (Ithaca) | 9 a.m. (Beijing)
Welcome and Introduction

8:15 p.m. (Ithaca) | 9:15 a.m. (Beijing)
Keynote Address: Lu Wenyu & Wang Shu, Amateur Architecture Studio

9:15 p.m. (Ithaca) | 10:15 a.m. (Beijing) | Panel

Speakers:
Xu Tiantian, DnA Design and Architecture
Song Yehao, SUP Atelier
Song Gang, Atelier cnS

Moderator:
Ying Hua, Director of Cornell China Center

RURAL ITERATIONS

Where the Oxford English Dictionary defines “reiteration” as an act of repetition, in architecture, to iterate and reiterate is to work in a cyclical methodology, prototyping, testing, and analyzing, to refine a product or process.

This panel looks in detail at recent works that “iterate” upon China’s rural territories. In these projects, the rural is reclaimed as a repository of architectural materials and methods, which had been gradually lost during urbanization, and re-iterated to produce new architecture that is nonetheless highly contextualized and connected to local cultural and material practices. Sometimes this reclamation is literal – repurposing material and site; and sometimes methodological; and sometimes programmatic.

Through the work of the speakers, we gain an understanding of the speed, scale, and context of China’s rural transformation, as well as how practitioners can work with local communities and craftsmen, manufacturers, government agencies, and outside experts on technology to reiterate materials and cultures practices for new architectural methods.

The symposium also has additional events in Ithaca. View the 2-day symposium overview, schedule, exhibition, and organizers.

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 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.

This talk formulates an approach to Trans-Asia Critical Humanities by showing how trans-local theory emerges and travels from situated ordinary experience to bring Asia in dialogue with the world. With a focus on how media forms are interconnected to tell stories of our contemporary time, I dive into Chinese digital media scenes to consider the theoretical potential of remix, a creative practice of recycling waste and fragments across media to transmit social memory and political consciousness. I discuss a cultural boom since the late 2010s, within which repressed stories of laid-off workers during China’s radical market transitions in the 1990s have been refashioned across all realms of media to critique the current economic crisis and labor precarity. By examining how the art of remix crosses spatial, temporal, medial, and ideological boundaries, I highlight its intervention in blasting open a trans-Asian history of disposability and forging new grounds of relatedness in the precarious global present.

An interpretation of Trans-Asia Critical Humanities based on generalizable notions of hybridity, interconnected flows, and horizontality evokes the principle of nested, generative feedback functions, which increasingly undergird finance capital, machine learning, and data governance today. A diagram of loops easily conjures the recursive fantasy driving our economic infrastructure, which claims that everything belongs to the same kind of network. In view of this cultural logic of self-generating networks, even our prized notions of scholarly self-reflexivity, and by extension, complicity, may be inadequate. Despite this preliminary cynicism, my talk inhabits different scales of thinking to argue that the crucial difference between a speculative, heuristic loop and an automated, systemic one remains one for the critical humanities to make. “Asia in Loops” maps the trajectory of my research beginning from my first book, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1896-1906 (Duke UP, 2021). From there, I share my ongoing research that attempts a version of Trans-Asia, which does not reproduce the curves and lines of interconnectedness found in any Belt-and-Road-Initiative-related infographics. Ultimately, “Asia in Loops” raises a very old problem: can culture or critique still assert its autonomy in the face of the recursive principles driving such varying political-technical-commercial assemblages or network forms: And can we do so without worrying excessively about method?

The Global University, Addressing New Subjects of Knowledge is Panel 1 of a 4 panel series which is part of Working in the Traces of Area Studies hosted by faculty emerita Brett DeBary (Asian Studies, Cornell) and Naoki Sakai (Asian Studies, Cornell).

We propose that the disciplines called “Area Studies,” while greatly
contributing to the postwar reform of the university, have reached a point
of historical stasis that demands we search for novel objects,
unaccustomed viewpoints, and different methods of inquiry. After World
War II, the “West’s” center of gravity shifted from Western Europe to North
America, with the United States beginning to occupy the epistemological
center in knowledge production. But Area Studies now confronts the
emergence of global universities transformed by the requirements of
neoliberal economic reforms, the shifting geopolitical balance of power,
unprecedented mobility of information and subjects of knowledge, and the
formation of transnational communities based on media-generated affect.
What are the implications for Area Studies, and its relation to the
humanities in general?

Panelists:

Rey Chow (Literature, Duke University)

John Kim (German/Japanese Comparative Literature, UC, Riverside)

Lisa Yoneyama (East Asian Studies, University of Toronto)

Discussant: Setsu Shigematsu (Media and Cultural Studies, UC, Riverside)

Faculty hosts: Brett DeBary and Naoki Sakai

What is Working in the Traces of Area Studies?

“Working in the Traces of Area Studies” will convene a series of international virtual symposia over the 2023 academic year. “The situation of area studies” will be the overarching theme, with the objective of developing thinking on how the tasks assigned to postwar “area studies” might be re-envisioned, and asking if there is still a plausibility of a trans-national, trans-ethnic, and trans-civilizational positionality from which the discipline of area studies may be revised. Discussions will focus on the implications of the ongoing reconfiguration of power relations which have rendered uncertain the places of the “West” and “non-West” in the disciplinary structure of area studies. Particularly critical will be analysis of the inter-related related concepts of “area,” “language,” “culture” and embodied “ethnicity” or “race.” On this basis, the series will suggest that new comparative perspectives are urgently needed, especially to African and East European Studies, which have traditionally shared with Asian Studies the designation of “area studies.”

Abstract: Without action from China, the world will not be able to contain the climate emergency. China produced nearly 30% of global carbon emissions in 2020, making Xi Jinping’s declaration that year that his country would be carbon neutral by 2060 one of epic significance. Will China be able to meet or exceed this goal, and what political and economic roadblocks stand in its way? This lecture introduces some of the challenges, opportunities, and competing narratives at play, with a particular focus on real estate construction and China’s growth model.

Bio: Prof. Wallace teaches courses related to urbanization, authoritarianism, and economic development. China’s Next Economy is a lecture course focusing on today’s debates about the costs and opportunities facing the leaders and citizens of China as they transition into the technology and service-dominated future.

This event is presented as part of the 2023 Perspectives on the Climate Change Challenge Seminar Series:

Most Mondays, Spring Semester 2023, 2:45-4:00pm(via Zoom OR In person in 155 Olin Hall)This university-wide seminar series is open to the public, and provides important views on the critical issue of climate change, drawing from many perspectives and disciplines. Experts from Cornell University and beyond present an overview of the science of climate change and climate change models, the implications for agriculture, ecosystems, and food systems, and provide important economic, ethical, and policy insights on the issue. The seminar is being organized and sponsored by the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering and Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.