The Berlage

The City of the Future project – financed by the Ford Foundation and directed by C.A. Doxiadis – was a project of management, and one that embraced open-endedness as part of the agency of global planning. Self-correcting and continuously designed, the City of the Future has perhaps obvious connections to the similarly algorithmic and self-regulating smart city of today. This lecture will suggest that the often explicit relationship between the COF project and structures of power in the international arena might help complicate the assumed detachment and abstraction of contemporary smartness, allowing for the possibility that political representation and the shaping of space might still be relevant for both efforts.  

Jeannie Kim is an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, where she teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs in architecture. Prior to this, she was the Director of Publications at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and director of the National Design Awards at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Her research has appeared in numerous publications including Hunch, Volume, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Log, Cold War Hot Houses (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), and Engineered Transparency: The Technical, Visual and Spatial Effects of Glass (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009).