KNIGHT PROGRAM AND SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AT UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI HOST INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON CIVIC ART
OCTOBER 4 – 6, 2002

September 5, 2002 – Civic Art 2002, hosted by the Knight Program in Community Building and the School of Architecture at the University of Miami, is a symposium on the art of town planning. The symposium will focus on the historic and contemporary meaning of civic art, its application to community building in today’s cities, and the significance of Werner Hegemann, co-author with Elbert Peets of 1922’s The American Vitruvius: An Architects’ Handbook of Civic Art. Speakers include nationally and internationally renowned scholars, architects, and planners. The symposium takes place at The Wolfsonian-FIU on Miami Beach on October 4-6, 2002. For a continually updated schedule of the event and the speakers attending, check the website www.arc.miami.edu/knight.

More than twenty speakers are scheduled for lectures and panels, including featured speakers Jean-Louis Cohen (NYU-IFA Paris), Cristiane Crasemann Collins (Boston), Andres Duany (Duany Plater-Zyberk, Miami),Vittorio Magnano Lampugnani (ETH Zrich), Allan Platus (Yale University), Gwendolyn Wright (Columbia University), and Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner (CCS-TT – Caracas).

“A century ago civic art was the common language of architecture, town planning and landscape architecture that transcended both professional and national boundaries,” says Charles C. Bohl, director of the Knight Program in Community Building. “Today we talk about New Urbanism and smart growth in the US, urban regeneration and urban villages in the UK, sustainable community design in Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands – the latest theory and practice of good urbanism goes by many names in many nations. Civic art represents a common language that we hope will revive the lively and productive international dialog that was commonplace in the days of Raymond Unwin, Werner Hegemann and their contemporaries.”

The symposium will focus on:
• the significance of Werner Hegemann and the relevance – past, present, 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 experience regarding Civic Art during the last 100 years and its prospects for the first decades of the 21st century.

The symposium will feature a preview of the forthcoming publication of The New Civic Art—Elements of Town Planning (Rizzoli), edited by Andrés Duany and Robert Alminana. Published eighty years after The American Vitruvius and patterned on Hegemann’s masterwork, the encyclopedic display, with 1200 illustrations, exemplifies the very best contemporary urban planning and town design schemes.

Symposium Hours, Cost, and Information
Hours are 8:30-8 on Friday, 9-6 on Saturday and 10-1 on Sunday. Cost is $75 for the seminar; $40 per day; $25 per morning or afternoon session. Free for students. For information contact: 305.284.4420, knight@arc.miami.edu.

About the Knight Program in Community Building
The mission of the Knight Program in Community Building is to advance the knowledge and practice of effective community building through interdisciplinary initiatives including mid-career fellowships, graduate scholarships, conferences, charrettes, and publications. The Knight Program is based at the University of Miami School of Architecture and is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which promotes excellence in journalism worldwide and invests in the vitality of twenty-six U.S. communities.

The University of Miami School of Architecture
A central tenet of the University of Miami School of Architecture is building livable communities. The school’s mission begins with community and a focus on the city as a work of art and architecture. Led by Dean Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism, the School of Architecture has achieved international distinction. Areas of specialized study include suburb and town design, computing, and research.