Montréal’s Cana­dian Centre for Archi­tec­ture (CCA), in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Cities Pro­gramme of the London School of Eco­nom­ics and Polit­i­cal Sci­ence (LSE), will host this year’s James Stir­ling Memo­r­ial Lec­ture on The City this coming Thurs­day, 13 Nov. 2008 (7pm) at the museum; admis­sion is free. In it’s 3rd year, the inter­na­tional com­pe­ti­tion intends to “promote inno­v­a­tive approaches to urban phe­nom­ena, and to repo­si­tion archi­tec­ture at the centre of debates on the city of the 21st century.”

This year’s lec­ture is by Robert Man­gurian and Mary-​Ann Ray of Studio Works (Los Ange­les) and will present Bei­jing Inside Out: Caochangdi.

Research Project

Caochangdi, one of more than 300 urban vil­lages in the city of Bei­jing, tells a spe­cific story about itself and its mostly ille­gal res­i­dents (includ­ing farm­ers, floaters, taxi dri­vers, and world-​class artists). Also embed­ded within it are both the prob­lems and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of a new urban space that is redefin­ing the city of Bei­jing at this piv­otal point in human his­tory when cities make up half of the world’s pop­u­la­tion. The lec­tur­ers, who live and work in Caochangdi, dis­sect the mul­ti­ple phe­nom­ena that form this dynamic urban condition.

Robert Man­gurian and Mary-​Ann Ray’s win­ning pro­posal opens up an orig­i­nal dis­cus­sion of issues of devel­op­ment in China, going beyond a con­cern with extreme den­si­fi­ca­tion, and address­ing a dynamic urban con­text in a way that is both historically-​informed and clearly ori­ented to emerg­ing social, polit­i­cal and cul­tural processes.

Robert Man­gurian and Mary-​Ann Ray, prin­ci­pals at Studio Works in Los Ange­les, were selected from 43 appli­cants from 15 coun­tries, rang­ing from senior schol­ars and prac­ti­tion­ers to emerg­ing voices.

This year’s jury included:
James Corner (Founder and Direc­tor of Field Oper­a­tions, New York; Chair and Pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of Land­scape Archi­tec­ture and Regional Plan­ning at the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia Grad­u­ate School of Design), Ann Pendleton-​Jullian (Asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of Archi­tec­ture, MIT School of Archi­tec­ture and Plan­ning, Boston), Matthias Sauer­bruch (Archi­tect, Sauer­bruch Hutton Archi­tects, Berlin and London), Fran Tonkiss (Asso­ciate Direc­tor, Cities Pro­gramme, the London School of Eco­nom­ics and Polit­i­cal Sci­ence (LSE)) and Mirko Zar­dini (Archi­tect, Urban The­o­rist, and Direc­tor of the CCA).