Nina Rappaport will lecture about her project Vertical Urban Factory on Thursday, October 22, as part of MAS Context’s 2015 Fall Talks series. The lecture will take place at the Charnley-Persky House, headquarters of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Vertical Urban Factory, a traveling exhibition and book with Actar publishers, focuses on the spaces of production in cities—both Modernist and contemporary—and incorporates the architectural, technological, and economic factors that shape their design, function, and social impact. In the project, Nina addresses the history of the urban factory in its vertical typology while looking forward, provoking new concepts for the future of urban manufacturing. She underscores the necessity of creating new paradigms for sustainable, hybrid, and transparent urban industries that also take into account the worker in the city and the new economy. For more information about the project, you can visit www.verticalurbanfactory.org.

Nina Rappaport is an architectural critic, curator, historian, and educator. For eighteen years she has been publications director at Yale School of Architecture, for which she edits the bi-annual magazine Constructs, exhibition catalogs, and the school’s book series. She directs the project Vertical Urban Factory, which includes a traveling exhibition (Detroit, New York, Toronto, London, Lausanne), public programs, and a book published in 2015 by Actar. She curated exhibitions on Ezra Stoller in Washington, D.C., The Swiss Section at the Van Alen Institute, and Saving Corporate Modernism, at Yale. She authored the book Support and Resist: Structural Engineers and Design Innovation (Monacelli Press, 2007) and co-edited the books Ezra Stoller: Photographer (Yale University Press, 2012) and Long Island City: Connecting the Arts (Design Trust for Public Space and Episode Books, 2008). She has taught at Parsons School of Design, Syracuse School of Architecture in New York, and Barnard College, among others. Her projects have received grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and New York State Council on the Arts. She has written numerous essays on structural design, architecture, and global industrial landscapes. She is a founding board member of Docomomo US and NY/Tri-State. For more information about her, please visit www.ninarappaport.com. You can also read her article about Vertical Urban Factory from our Production issue.

$10 suggested donation at the door. Includes wine.

This talk is organized in collaboration with the Society of Architectural Historians and presented in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Funding for this talk is provided by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP.

MAS Context is supported by a grant by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and by private donations.

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Tags: Architecture, Gold Coast, Industry, MAS Context, Nina Rappaport, Society of Architectural Historians