Welcome to a special, League-themed edition of our Friday missive, rounding up an incredibly busy (in a good way!) week here at Urban Omnibus/Architectural League headquarters. In addition to unpacking boxes while walls and bookshelves are built up around us, this week also brought us a completely redesigned Architectural League website and the exhibition opening for Toward the Sentient City.
The new League website – beautifully designed and produced by Red Antenna, the same talented team that designed uomigrate2.wpengine.com – offers significantly improved options for navigating current, upcoming, and archived content about League programming of all kinds – lectures, exhibitions, podcasts, print publications, grant opportunities, and, of course, the ‘bus. If you don’t already have League programs on your radar (like next week’s group tour of Red Lines at the Queens Museum), you should! You can subscribe to the weekly email newsletter, @theLeague, or keep checking in with the calendar and highlighted items on the homepage.
Toward the Sentient City kicked off with a packed opening event last night. Thanks to everyone who came out, and congratulations are in order for all the teams, including past Omni-contributors Laura Forlano and David Benjamin. If you missed last week’s feature, check out all five teams discussing their projects in this series of short video interviews.
If you can’t get enough Sentient City, you can sign on for any of a number of Sentient City-related events coming up in the next few weeks, or scoot over to Conflux right about….now, to see exhibition curator Mark Shepard present the “Sentient City Survival Kit.” Amphibious Architecture team member Natalie Jeremijenko and Breakout! team member Anthony Townsend will also be speaking at Conflux this weekend, as will (drumroll please…) the Omnibus’ very own Cassim Shepard. Come one, come all. Cassim goes on Saturday afternoon at 4 p.m. Afterwards, come say hello to find out the location of a little drinks outing afterwards. Other Omni-friends participating in this extraordinary weekend of art and technology include former League staffer Rachel Barnard and her Smiling Experiment, Brooke Singer with Demolition Drugstore!, and Elizabeth Streb with PopAction. Check out the complete schedule on the Conflux Festival website.
Speaking of events celebrating the work of Omni-friends and collaborators, tonight also finds Kings County Cinema Society screening some films about urban gardening, including clips from the Omnibus launch piece on East New York. Next Tuesday, Governors Island fans (and Ann Buttenwieser fans for that matter) should mark their calendars for a book talk and signing at The Skyscraper Museum. Buttenwieser will be discussing, and signing copies of, her new book Governors Island: The Jewel of New York Harbor.
And if book talks and signings are your cup of tea, next Tuesday stop by the Union Square Barnes & Noble for a panel discussion with David Byrne and City DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.
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