In this talk, Professor David Gersten, will discuss the poetic, spatial imaginations, and social politics in John Hejduk’s works. He will address the poetic imagination as a dimension of human life, and a means of addressing our social political lives.

“Architecture remains in crisis, its social relevance lost between the two poles of formal innovation and technical sustainability. This lecture discusses possibilities for an architecture that can enhance our human values and capacities, an architecture that is connected--attuned--to its location and its inhabitants.”

With the third in our new Session series held in March 2018, Attunement, Alberto Pérez-Gómez took particpants on an in-depth journey through his writings on attunement, love, and performance in relation to the ethics of architecture.

Conversation with Alberto Perez Gomez

Over the course of 2 months, 40 RISD students worked closely with David Gersten and Michael Harrison. The works emerged in to ‘Galapagos In C’: an interactive, multimedia performance combining architecture, performance, and music.

"Exquisite Broken Circle" an Arts, Letters & Numbers workshop was held at Brown University. Conceived of as an embodied "exquisite corpse," participants from multidisciplinary backgrounds engage in action, re-action and reenactment within the construction of two half-circle arcs set back to back. Within each arc space of performance, a set of live-feed cameras and projections loop the image(s) and the performer(s) in an infinite mirror of responsive and repetitive movement that creates a dialogue between the performers and each set of actions.

Arts, Letters & Numbers was excited to host our first Mill Talk with guest speaker, Professor Remo Guidieri. After a delicious kebab lunch-in, guests gathered to hear an introduction by David Gersten followed by a lecture by Professor Guidieri, titled ‘Argonauts Anthology’. It was a beautiful day in the country filled with foods, drinks, fire and conversation in our newly renovated Mill.

‘Circles: Drawing on Friendship’ was the first of the Art, Letters & Numbers workshops to be held in our Mill in Upstate New York. Through a deep intellectual, emotional, and creative questioning, we drew up a series of works and created new structures, new spaces, new stories which culminated in a celebratory performance. The collective creative urgency was a crucible of emotive precision from which we pour the foundation for our future workshops.

The 'Aarhus Arc' was built by 150 master students at the Aarhus School of Architecture. In an act reminiscent of the Globe Theater, the arc was carried in large segments through the snow and (re)constructed within the school’s theatre. Performing as a wall, a drawing board/film screen, it divided the space, inviting people to whisper through it, draw through it, cut through it. Through these acts of empathy for those on the other side, the arc transformed into an architecture, a theater, a film, a drawing, a conversation, an action, a school, and a contribution to a city culminating in a series of performances of magical moments, smoke and fire!

The 'Open Book' Workshop was an initial step towards what has become Arts Letters & Numbers. The students from the studio "Making Real" participated in this collaborative workshop orchestrated by David Gersten and Anne Romme. The workshop explored the interrelations between gravity, bodies, drawing, time through inhabiting plans on floors, sections on walls, and the space in between.

The architectural act of building the model, created and contained the deep relationships between care, craft and community; Craft gathers us together, through the collective actions of constructing a model of the school, a community was formed, a remarkable connective tissue emerged within the studio. This structure, this social contract ultimately embodies The Cooper Union.