Spectrum: The Lockwood Thompson Dialogues

Thursday, October 29 at 6 p.m.
FREE and open to the public

Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium
at the Cleveland Public Library
East 6th and Superior Avenue

featuring
ALEX WASHBURN & FRED SALVUCCI
with moderator STEVE LITT

spectrum An annual program of conversations focusing on issues that impact our visual and popular culture. Presented by the Cleveland Public Library in partnership with Cleveland Public Art, these events will generate innovative, unexplored, and provocative dialogues.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29

The design of our cities shapes nearly every aspect of our daily lives: where and how we live, how we travel, and how we experience these places along the way. Road, highway, and other infrastructure projects built over the last half-century have neglected to consider the power that well-designed places have to spark the civic imagination and connect us to our environment.

Today our nation is reinvesting in our cities by rebuilding the streets, bridges, highways, waterfronts, and green spaces that shape our urban landscape. The 2009 Spectrum program asks how we can make the most of this moment by exploring how engineering and design can come together to shape the new American city.

Civic Design & Inspired Infrastructure brings some of the nation’s most innovative thinkers and practitioners in the urban design field to the Cleveland Public Library to discuss how well-designed infrastructure projects bring together form and function to shape successful cities.

THIS YEAR'S GUESTS ARE:

Moderator, Steven Litt, Art & Architecture Critic for The Plain Dealer.

Alexandros Washburn, Chief Urban Designer, New York City Planning Department. Mr. Washburn is currently writing The Nature of Urban Design, a book which brings together the large-scale vision of Robert Moses with the pedestrian-scale sentiments of Jane Jacobs. He has been involved in projects ranging from the redesign of Penn Station (now Moynihan Station) to closing off vehicular traffic in Times Square.

Fred Salvucci, Civil Engineer and Professor at MIT. Mr. Salvucci specializes in infrastructure and urban transportation systems. He served as the Secretary of Transportation in Massachusetts under Governor Dukakis and was involved in the planning of the Big Dig in Boston.

RECOMMENDED READING LIST

Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Robert Caro: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Anthony Flint: Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City

Felix Rohatyn: Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now

David Billington: The Art of Structural Design: A Swiss Legacy

Charles Waldheim, editor: The Landscape Urbanism Reader

Bernard Rudofsky: Streets for People: a Primer for Americans

Allan B. Jacobs: Great Streets

Alex Marshall: How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken

Urban Design Associates: The Urban Design Handbook: Techniques and Working Methods

Holly Rarick: Progressive vision : the planning of downtown Cleveland, 1903-1930