Urban Uplift: Using Architecture to Strengthen Communities

Wednesday April 27, 2011

6:00 p.m.

Margaret Liebman Berger Forum

Room 227 (2^nd Floor)

The New York Public Library

Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

5^th Avenue at 42^nd Street

New York , NY 10018

212-340-0871

www.nypl.org

directions

Room 227 opens to the public at 5:30 p.m.

All events are FREE and subject to last minute change or cancellation.

Vancouver-based Bing Thom Architects have quietly produced a portfolio of built work that garners praise for its inspired spaces and forms as well as the inspirational role their buildings play in the lives of the communities they call home. The firm’s commitment to using great architecture to improve the urban context and social condition is a consistent theme that has run through the firms’ work for nearly 30 years. Principals Bing Thom and Michael Heeney share a fundamental belief in the transformative power of great architecture to uplift, not only the physical, but also the economic and social conditions of a community. The firm’s belief in this power has become the grounding philosophy for the office, and has resulted in memorable architecture that consistently taps into something beyond aesthetics.

Copies of Bing Thom Works are available for purchase and signing at the event.

Bing Thom Architects (BTA), founded in 1982 in Vancouver, has executed a wide spectrum of projects in Canada, Europe and China, from single-family residences to the design of entire cities. In October 2010, BTA completed the firm’s first major US project, the new Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater in Washington, D.C., to be followed by the opening of the Trinity River East campus of Tarrant County College in Fort Worth Texas, which is the first phase of the Trinity River Uptown plan, the largest urban redevelopment currently being undertaken in the United States. Some of the firm’s other recent and current projects include Central City and Surrey City Centre Library, both in Surrey, British Columbia; and the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver. Bing Thom Architects has also been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the 2010 Architectural Firm Award from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, the most prestigious honor that can be awarded to a Canadian architectural practice.

Born in Edinburgh , raised in Canada , and currently living in Philadelphia Witold Rybczynski is the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania . He has written on architecture and urbanism for The New York Times , The Atlantic , The New Yorker and Slate. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Home and the A Clearing in the Distance , a biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, for which he was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. His most recent book Makeshift Metropolis was published in 2010. He is the recipient of the National Building Museum 's 2007 Vincent Scully Prize.