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Civic Art 2002 Symposium, October 4-6, 2002 (Miami Beach,
Florida)
In 1922, the year of Le Corbusier’s Cité contemporaine pour trois
millions d’habitants, Werner Hegemann and Elbert Peets published The
American Vitruvius—An Architect’s Handbook of Civic Art, a monumental
work of 400 pages and 1200 illustrations. Conceived not as a treatise but as an
"atlas for imaginary traveling," according to Christiane Crasemann
Collins, it was the only comprehensive survey of a specifically American
"art of building cities" and the pinnacle of more than half a century
of theoretical development and urban reform in Europe and America. After a
period of obscurity, the book was "rediscovered" in the 1980s and
republished, with extraordinary success, in a facsimile edition by Princeton
Architectural Press in 1992.
Eighty years after the original, Rizzoli will publish The New Civic Art—Elements
of Town Planning. Patterned on Hegemann’s masterwork and edited by Andrés
Duany and Robert Alminana, the 1200 illustration, encyclopedic volume will
present the very best contemporary urban planning and town design schemes. On
the occasion of this new publication and the 80th anniversary of the
original American Vitruvius, the Knight Program in Community Building at
the University of Miami School of Architecture has organized this three-day
international symposium. The goal of the symposium is nothing less than the
revival of a broad international dialog on civic art in the spirit of Hegemann,
Peets and their contemporaries. The symposium focuses on:
· The importance of Werner Hegemann and the
relevance—past, contemporary, and future—of his work.
· The contemporary meaning of Civic Art and
its application to "community building" within the multi-cultural
and heterogeneous modern city.
· The international exchange of ideas and
experiences regarding Civic Art during the last 100 years and its prospects
for the first decades of the 21st century. The international development of
the New Urbanism movement will be at the heart of this discussion.
Program for Civic Art
2002: The New Civic Art, Werner Hegemann and International Exchanges
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