User:Petertlang

Peter Lang Short Bio. September, 2009

Peter Lang holds a Bachelor in Architecture from Syracuse University (1980) and a Ph.D. in history and urbanism from NYU (2000). He was awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship in 1996. Peter Lang currently is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture Texas A&M where he teaches architectural design and theory.

In both his research and contemporary practice, Lang investigates how the living environment is constructed through an evolving architectural practice. He studies historical developments from the 1960s that focused on cultural transformations in society and the emerging architectural and design strategies that sought to respond to these transformations. Lang extends his perspective into the present day environment reshaped by the forces of globalization and growing urbanization. These studies are conducted primarily through field research and workshops focusing on marginal communities and their informal habitats.

As part of Columbia University’s “Living Archives” series Lang co-curated with Mark Wasiuta (Columbia University) and Luca Molinari (Naples University), Environments and Counter Environments: Experimental Media in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, MoMA 1972. The exhibition opened to the public at Buell Hall on April 13, 2009.

Lang most recently moderated the symposium “Visions of the Global City” in “Beyond Media 2009: Visions” in Florence Leopolda Station, Florence, July 10, 2009. Participants included Lars Krukeberg-GRAFT and Marco D’Eramo.

Lang, as part of the editorial thinktank for the Dutch Pavilion at the XI Exhibition on Architecture at the 2008 Venice Biennial curated by the NAI and Stealth contributed a chapter in the instant book, Archiphoenix: future faculties for architecture as well as moderated a session on the same subject. >www.facultiesforarchitecture.org<

Lang co-curated with William Menking (Pratt Institute) the exhibition Superstudio: Life Without Objects for the London Design Museum (March-June 2003), as well as co-authored the book of the same title for Skira publications.

Lang's work on contemporary marginal communities, together with the Rome based urban art research group Stalker/ON, is funded by major international architecture and arts institutions and national and local governments. He has been invited to give lectures, organize workshops and publish his findings across Europe and the United States, and he has been involved in numerous exhibitions on this subject. Some of the significant recent essays are: •	“Stalker Unbounded: Urban Activism and the Terrain Vague as Heterotopia by Default" (Routledge 2008) •	"Stalker On Location" (Routledge 2007) •	"Rubble to Rabble: Tales of Two Generations of Italian Architects and Designers, and their Splendid but Nearly Impossible Rebellions."(Tank Magazine, London) •	"Over My Dead City" in Kyong Park, Detroit (Map Book Publishers, Hong Kong) •	"Chinatown is Everywhere" (AD Books, London)

Environments Counter-Environments Mario Bellini Alberto Rosselli Zanuso/Sapper Joe Colombo Gae Aulenti Ettore Sottsass Jr. Gaetano Pesce Archizoom Superstudio Ugo La Pietra, Gruppo Strum 9999

Curators: Peter Lang, Luca Molinari, Mark Wasiuta An exhibition developed at the GSAPP, Columbia University with the participation of the Museum of Modern Art, New York The exhibition opened to the public 4/13 - 5/8 at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Buell Hall (Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri, 12pm-6pm) as part of the GSAPP Living Archive program. Exhibitions within this program open for reconsideration some of the most provocative projects of the last decades through the acts of collecting and exposing archival material.

Environments and Counter Environments: Experimental Media in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, MoMA 1972 brings together for the first time since 1972 the original documents and multi-media projections featured in the historic MoMA show curated by Emilio Ambasz. The current exhibition focuses on the 1972 Environments section, that featured a series of full scale experimental domestic modules designed for the exhibition and installed in the MoMA galleries. Each of the Environments, created by a different Italian architecture studio or design group, was accompanied by media projections, audio-visual displays, or interactive events. The historic importance and contemporary relevance of INDL is in part due to how the exhibition encountered and attempted to reconceive the visionary possibilities of design and architecture: domestic in scale, urban in context, and potentially revolutionary in social and political practice. Ambasz intended the environments to interrogate the “rituals and ceremonies of the 24 hour day,” and to “design spaces and artifacts that give it structure.” Under the curator’s program objects in space became the agents of spatial and social transformation. In physical dilation, conceived as environmental and mediatory, objects could become their antithesis, or could become subsumed into the life forces of urban society. The films and media projects produced for the 1972 show, at the core of the GSAPP exhibition, were intended to demonstrate such alterability and a score of transformative effects. In this light, the current exhibition encounters again mediatic and environmental strategies and their potential for rethinking the boundaries of architecture, domestic spaces, their conditions and territories.