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FRINGE: New Centers for Architecture and Urbanism
2023 Preston Thomas Memorial Symposium
Curated and Organized by Assistant Professor Leslie Lok.
Coordinated by Design Teaching Fellow Hanxi Wang (B.Arch. '18).
The FRINGE is an ambiguous and ubiquitous patchwork of zones that form a wide range of territorial landscapes which can be characterized as neither distinctly urban nor distinctly rural. Driven by narratives of unrelenting and perpetual urbanization, the FRINGE constitutes the global engine for rural transformation and urban growth, a site for extractive industries, a territory for agricultural and technological production, and a continuous land supply for architectural development and the expansion of urbanites. Formerly understood as peripheral, these multivalent rural-urban zones constitute new conceptual centers for architecture and urbanism. Redefining architectural agency across scales, FRINGE innovations range from state-of-the-art and adaptive material usage in construction to the development of atypical spatial morphologies and programmatic adjacencies.
Containing some of the world’s most intensely altered rural-urban contexts, East and Southeast Asia provide a fertile seedbed for research on global FRINGE architecture and urbanism. Bringing together innovative design and research through the lens of the built environment, this symposium questions: How do the material and technological changes brought about by urbanization collide with the spatial, cultural, and social practices of the rural? How do such meetings create or alter the special conditions of agency and interconnection, from the digital to the traditional, from the informal to the infrastructural, within the rural-urban?
Kicking off with a keynote address and the first panel in Beijing on March 2 (cohosted with the Cornell China Center), the symposium continued with a second and third panel in Milstein Auditorium in Ithaca on March 3. An accompanying exhibition was on view in the Bibliowicz Family Gallery from Feb 28 to March 23. The symposium aimed to unpack the FRINGE's spatial, ecological, and technological capacities to reveal design strategies that strive to be environmentally conscious, socially equitable, and architecturally adaptive.
The Preston H. Thomas series is funded through a gift to Cornell's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning from Ruth and Leonard B. Thomas of Auburn, New York, in memory of their son, Preston. The symposium events are free and open to the public. The Symposium’s Beijing Panel is co-hosted and co-sponsored by the support of the Cornell China Center and in collaboration with Associate Professor Ying Hua, Nina Trautmann Chaopricha, and Peter Wen.
