Laura Kurgan

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Laura Kurgan
Laura Kurgan.jpg
Laura Kurgan speaking at Columbia University, September 2015
Born
South Africa
OccupationArchitect and Professor
Known forDirector, Center for Spatial Research, Columbia University

Laura Kurgan is a South African architect and an associate professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). [1] [2] [3] She directs the interdisciplinary Center for Spatial Research at GSAPP, which she founded as the Spatial Information Design Lab in 2004. [4] Since 1995, the architect has operated her own New York City based interdisciplinary design firm called Laura Kurgan Design. [5] She has been awarded the Rockefeller Fellowship and a Graham Foundation Grant. [6] Kurgan's work has been presented at prestigious institutions including the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum and the Venice Architecture Biennial. [7] [8]

Contents

Projects

Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics

In 2013 the MIT Press published her book "Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics." [9] The book explores the impact of modern spatial visualization technology including GPS, democratized dissemination of data through the internet, and Google Earth on mapping physical and virtual interactions. [10] [11] In Jennifer S. Light's review of the book, she states the strongest aspect of the early chapters in the book is that it "introduces design professionals to a new form of media literacy." [12] The work was presented in conversation with Neil Brenner at Princeton University's School of Architecture in October 2013. [13]

Million Dollar Blocks

Created in conjunction with the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University and the Justice Mapping Center, Million Dollar Blocks was a term coined by Laura Kurgan and Eric Cadora to describe the amount of money that taxpayers may spend on incarcerating the people on an individual city block. [14] The project used information from the criminal justice system to create maps which visualized the disproportionately large number of people jailed from a couple of specific neighborhoods in five American cities. [15] In her essay in The Atlantic about the project, Kurgan wrote "Nationwide, an estimated two-thirds of the people who leave prison are rearrested within three years. The perpetual migration between prison and a few predictable neighborhoods is not only costly—it also destabilizes community life." [16] In 2008, an image from the project, labeled "Architecture and Justice 1", was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for the show Design and the Elastic Mind. [17] The work has since been collected by the Museum of Modern Art. [18] In the catalog essay for that 2008 exhibition, Recently the Brooklyn maps from the project were presented again at the Museum of Modern Art for its exhibition Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from the Collection. [19] In the catalog for the exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind, edited by curator Paola Antonelli, the urban theorist Peter Hall stated that the project, "does offer a new kind of benchmark for critical visualization." [20]

Jumping the Great Firewall

Done in collaboration with a team from the Spatial Information Design Lab, Pen American Center and the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, this project investigated free expression online in China. As principal investigator, Kurgan led her team of researchers in examining and visualizing the strategies that Chinese internet users employ to access and participate in aspects of the web that are typically blocked in that country. [21]

Related Research Articles

Information visualization study of visual representations of data

Information visualization or information visualisation is the study of (interactive) visual representations of abstract data to reinforce human cognition. The abstract data include both numerical and non-numerical data, such as text and geographic information. However, information visualization differs from scientific visualization: "it's infovis [information visualization] when the spatial representation is chosen, and it's scivis [scientific visualization] when the spatial representation is given".

Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York City, also known simply as GSAPP, is regarded as one of the most important and prestigious architecture schools in the world. It is also home to the well-regarded Masters of Science program in Advanced Architectural Design, Historic Preservation, Real Estate Development, Urban Design, and Urban Planning.

Geoinformatics is the science and the technology which develops and uses information science infrastructure to address the problems of geography, cartography, geosciences and related branches of science and engineering.

Opte Project

The Opte Project, created in 2003 by Barrett Lyon, seeks to generate an accurate representation of the breadth of the Internet using visual graphics. Lyon believes that his network mapping can help teach students more about the Internet while also acting as a gauge illustrating both overall Internet growth and the specific areas where that growth occurs. It was not the first such project; others predated it, such as the Bell Labs Internet Mapping Project.

Kengo Kuma Japanese architect (b.1954)

Kengo Kuma is a Japanese architect and professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Tokyo. Frequently compared to contemporaries Shigeru Ban and Kazuyo Sejima, Kuma is also noted for his prolific writings. He is the designer of the New National Stadium, Tokyo which has been built for 2020 Summer Olympics.

Evan Roth American artist

Evan Roth is a US artist who applies a hacker philosophy to an art practice that visualizes transient moments in public space, online and in popular culture. In 2012, he was awarded a Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award.

James Powderly American artist

James Powderly is an artist, designer and engineer whose work has focused on creating tools for graffiti artists and political activists, designing robots and spatial computing platforms, and promoting open source culture.

Martin M. Wattenberg is an American scientist and artist known for his work with data visualization. Along with Fernanda Viégas, he worked at the Cambridge location of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center as part of the Visual Communication Lab, and created Many Eyes. In April 2010, Wattenberg and Viégas started a new venture called Flowing Media, Inc., to focus on visualization aimed at consumers and mass audiences. Four months later, both of them joined Google as the co-leaders of the Google's "Big Picture" data visualization group in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lisa Strausfeld is an American design professional and information architect.

François Roche architectural experimenter

François Roche is a French architect, co-founder of the architecture studio, New-Territories including LabM4, R&Sie(n), [eIf/bʌt/c], Mindmachinemakingmyths, among others names.

Manuel Lima FRSA is a Portuguese-born designer, author, lecturer, and researcher. WIRED describes Lima as “the man who turns data into art” while Creativity magazine considers Lima “the Edward Tufte of the 21st Century". He is a leading voice on information visualization and the founder of VisualComplexity.com - A visual exploration on mapping complex networks. He is the author of three books translated into several languages, respectively Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information (2011), The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge (2014), and The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge (2017). He currently resides in New York City.


Mario Gooden is a principal and founder of Huff + Gooden Architects. Gooden co-founded Huff + Gooden with his partner Ray Huff in 1997. Gooden is also a Professor of Practice at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) of Columbia University, where he teaches architectural design and theory. Gooden held previous academic appointments at the Yale School of Architecture as the Louis I. Khan Distinguished Visiting Professor, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (Sci-Arc) in Los Angeles, the University of Arizona (Tucson), the University of Florida (Gainesville), Clemson University, and The City College of New York.

Amale Andraos Lebanese architect

Amale Andraos is a New York-based architect. She is dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She is the co-founder of WORKac with her husband, Dan Wood.

Karla Rothstein American architect

Karla Maria S. Rothstein is an American architect and adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she is also the founder and director of Columbia University's trans-disciplinary DeathLAB Rothstein is also the co-founder of Latent Productions, an architecture, research, and development firm in New York City, which she co-founded in 1999 with Salvatore Perry. A significant focus of her architecture practice, research, and teaching has been redefining urban spaces of death and remembrance.

Hilary Sample is an American architect, principal and co-founder of award-winning architecture firm MOS Architects in New York City.

Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss is a Yugoslav born architect, artist and theorist living and working in New York. He was an Ex-Head of Research of Herzog & De Meuron Architects, co-founder of School of Missing Studies for spatial research and founder of NAO.NYC for spatial design at all scales needed based in New York.

Troy Conrad Therrien is a New York museum curator and architecture adjunct. Since 2014, Therrien has been the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's Head Curator of Architecture and Digital Initiatives. Before joining the Guggenheim, Therrien worked and taught in various capacities at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), and founded Therrien-Barley with fellow faculty member Chris Barley.

Reinhold Martin American architect

Reinhold Martin is an American architectural historian and professor. He currently serves as Professor of Architecture in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, where he directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. He is also a member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia. Until 2008, Martin was a partner in the architectural firm Martin/Baxi Architects with Kadambari Baxi.

Mark Henry Hansen is an American statistician, professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Director of the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation. His special interest is the intersection of data, art and technology. He adopts an interdisciplinary approach to data science, drawing on various branches of applied mathematics, information theory and new media arts. Within the field of journalism, Hansen has promoted coding literacy for journalists.

Jenny E. Sabin is an American architect, designer and artist who draws upon biology and mathematics to design material structures. Sabin is the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Professor of Architecture in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. She focuses on design and emerging technologies, with particular emphasis on the areas of computational design, data visualization and digital fabrication.

References

  1. ↑ "Columbia GSAPP Faculty". www.arch.columbia.edu. Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  2. ↑ "Laura Kurgan". United States Artists. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  3. ↑ "Game Changers | Laura Kurgan & Sarah Williams - Metropolis Magazine - January 2012". www.metropolismag.com. Archived from the original on 2016-03-07. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  4. ↑ "Architect's Newspaper A/N Blog". www.blog.archpaper.com. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  5. ↑ "Laura Kurgan". United States Artists. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  6. ↑ "Graham Foundation > Grantees > Laura Kurgan". www.grahamfoundation.org. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  7. ↑ "Laura Kurgan | Eyeo Festival". eyeofestival.com. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  8. ↑ "Plotting Movements: Laura Kurgan and Naeem Mohaiemen on the Politics of Space". www.newmuseum.org. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  9. ↑ "Kurgan, Laura 2013 Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics, reviewed by Columba Peoples". Society and space. Archived from the original on 2016-03-07. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  10. ↑ Kurgan, Laura (2013). Close Up at a Distance Mapping, Technology, and Politics. Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN   9781935408284.
  11. ↑ "As Seen from Above: A Review of "Close Up at a Distance"". Center for the Study of the Drone. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  12. ↑ Light, Jennifer S. (2014-01-01). "Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics by Laura Kurgan (review)". Technology and Culture. 55 (3): 769–770. doi:10.1353/tech.2014.0084. ISSN   1097-3729.
  13. ↑ "Laura Kurgan & Neil Brenner (respondent) - PROGRAM IN MEDIA + MODERNITY - PRINCETON UNIVERSITY". mediamodernity.princeton.edu. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  14. ↑ Badger, Emily (2015-07-30). "How mass incarceration creates 'million dollar blocks' in poor neighborhoods". The Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  15. ↑ "Million Dollar Blocks (Spatial Information Design Lab)". Design and Violence. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  16. ↑ Kurgan, Laura. "Prison Blocks". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  17. ↑ "Laura Kurgan's image, titled Architecture and Justice 1, was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art New York in the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition in 2008". Dwell. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  18. ↑ "Laura Kurgan, Eric Cadora, David Reinfurt, Sarah Williams, Spatial Information Design Lab, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. Architecture and Justice from the Million Dollar Blocks project. 2006 | MoMA". The Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  19. ↑ "At MoMA, Brooklyn's Rough Blocks Become Art – artnet News". artnet News. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
  20. ↑ Design and the Elastic Mind. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 2008-03-01. ISBN   9780870707322.
  21. ↑ "Jumping the Great Firewall - urbanNext". urbanNext. Retrieved 2016-02-29.
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