June 18 & June 25, 2003
Open Source Design

A discussion led by
Natalie Jeremijenko and Laura Kurgan

Getting Ambitious Structures
Built by the Community and for the Community

A Discussion led by
Natalie Jeremijenko,
the Director of the Engineering Design Studio
at Yale University
and
Laura Kurgan,
an Assistant Professor of Architecture
at Princeton University

Too often, new building projects for community organizations require major fund-raising efforts, from federal grants, private donors, foundations, and corporate philanthropy. Today, faced with decreasing funding for local and non-profit organizations (and ever more for international military projects), creating new structures to support the expansion of community infrastructure demands different strategies.

At the Bronx River Arts Center, Natalie Jeremijenko and Laura Kurgan will propose to update a strategy with which community based organizations are very familiar: the accumulation of small contributions, both monetary and in kind. Ms. Jeremijenko and Ms. Kurgan are interested in whether this form of participation can extend to the built environment and what kinds of architecture it might produce. Can community participation enable the construction of bold new facilities?

These two experimental design professors will present the open-source process for the Bronx River Art Center Access Structure Project, a strategy also known as commons-based peer production. In engineering contexts the open-source process has been used to produce complex software products built almost entirely by volunteersÕ labor, and that have outperformed competitive products developed by the largest corporations in the world. Their presentation will suggest a similar process to design a facility that is created by, and accountable to, those who will use it; one that will encourage authentic (and not just symbolic) community participation in the planning, implementation, and construction.

Ms. Jeremijenko and Ms. Kurgan will discuss the proposed design for a river-access structure for the Bronx River Art Center, in which the architecture and engineering are 'open-sourced.'

Natalie Jeremijenko, is a design engineer and technoartist. Recently she was named one of the top one hundred young innovators by the MIT Technology Review, her work was featured in the Tate Gallery Cream 2, and a large project was commissioned for the opening of the museum MASSMoCA (www.massmoca.org). Her work includes digital, electromechanical, and interactive systems in addition to biotechnological work that have been included in the Rotterdam Film Festival (2000), the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1999), the Museum Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, the LUX Gallery, London (1999), the Whitney Biennial Ô97, Documenta Ô97, Ars Electronica prix Ô96, presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As the director of the Engineering Design Studio at Yale University she is developing and implementing new courses in technological innovation.

Laura Kurgan is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Princeton University and runs an interdisciplanary practice in New York. Her recent projects include the New York offices of WITNESS (www.witness.org) and Around Ground Zero, a widely-distributed fold-out map of Lower Manhattan after September 11. Her installation projects have been exhibited internationally and focus on the creative diversion of advanced information technologies, in the interests of political engagement and memory.