2013
Second Annual David Dillon Symposium, April 18-19, 2013
Making Connections: The Networked City
In his classic 1937 essay “What Is a City?” Lewis Mumford proposed a deceptively simple definition: “the city is above all else a theater of social action.” Cities make connections between people, places, and ideas, and it is those connections that make a vital, thriving place. But how do we make those connections? How does design, from buildings to roads to the wires of our telecommunications network, help create that “theater of social action”? Is the vast landscape of the 21st century city, with its dependence on digital technology, fundamentally different than the cities of the past? At the Second Annual David Dillon Symposium, attendees discussed these questions and more as they explored the nature of today’s networked city.
Events were sponsored by the Dallas Architecture Forum, Dallas Morning News, Dallas Center for Architecture, and Nasher Sculpture Center.
Keynote address, April 18, 2013
Robert Bruegmann, author of Sprawl, A Compact History and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago
Symposium, April 19, 2013
Morning session: Thinking about DFW
Paula Lupkin, assistant professor, Department of Art History, University of North Texas
Kathryn Holliday, assistant professor and director, David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture, University of Texas at Arlington
Mark Lamster, new architecture and design critic for the Dallas Morning News and fellow of the Dillon Center
Afternoon session: The Networked City
Diana Lind, executive editor of Next City
Jonathan Massey, associate professor at the School of Architecture, Syracuse University
Andrew Blum, author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
Robert Bruegmann, author of Sprawl, A Compact History and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago (joining for the afternoon panel discussion)
moderated by Donald Gatzke, dean of the School of Architecture, University of Texas at Arlington.