Conceiving the Plan

Curated by Yael Hameiri Sainsaux AR’10 and first exhibited as part of the Italian Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale—inaugurates a dialogue with the legacy of the late architect and longtime Cooper Union Professor Diane Lewis AR’76. Composed of a series of post-2020 civic architecture projects for different sites, Conceiving the Plan asks: How can civic spaces be imbued with nuance? In what ways does such a quality persist in the city? Can one discuss intimacy in architectural terms?

For Diane Lewis, the city was not only the result of a great number of inextricable historical strata of form and memory, it was also a proposition about a moral and ethical life together. She approached the city as a mental universe all its own, greater than the sum of its individual architectures. For this exhibition, architects, former students, colleagues, and friends have generated comprehensive projects for civic space engaging Lewis’ pedagogy, carrying her legacy into contemporary dialogues. They touch on critical questions—literary, ecological, social, and metahistorical—providing and provoking spatial civic identities. Thus, they are also inseparable from deeply involved critical approaches to architectural pedagogy.