William Rees Morrish, Dean, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons the New School for Design
Kazys Varnelis, Director, Network Architecture Lab, GSAPP

Moderated by Robert Beauregard, Director, Urban Planning Program, GSAPP

Second Nature Infrastructure: Globalization, technology, and ecological change are radically changing our relationship with nature. Yet our approach to infrastructure remains embedded in the heroic ideas of the City Beautiful and WPA movements. How can we move towards the creation of infrastructure effective and appropriate to our day?

William Morrish is a nationally recognized urban designer and architect whose practice encompasses inter-disciplinary research on urban housing and infrastructure, collaborative publications on human settlement and community design, educational programs exploring integrated design which are applied to a wide range of innovative community based city projects.

He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, with a Bachelor of Architecture (1971) and Harvard Graduate School of Design, with a Master of Architecture in Urban Design (1978).

Kazys Varnelis is the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. In addition to directing the Netlab and conducting research, he is on the architecture faculty at Columbia and teaches studios and seminars in history, theory, and research.

Varnelis is a co-founder of the conceptual architecture/media group AUDC, which published Blue Monday: Absurd Realities and Natural Histories in 2007 and has exhibited widely in places such as High Desert Test Sites. He is editor of the Infrastructural City.