Guest Lecture „food urbanism“ by Craig Verzone (Vevey, Switzerland)
The lecture will be held in English and have a duration of approximately 60 minutes followed by a discussion. All students of the Faculty of Architecture will receive the invitation to the zoom meeting by email on Thursday, May 14 and via the central moodle space of the faculty. Craig Verzone's book on food urbanism will be published by Birkhäuser in 2020.
More information on Craig Verzone and the Food Urbanism Initiative
The Food Urbanism Initiative
FUI Lausanne is piloted by urban designers, architects, and landscape architects and draws on the expertise of researchers in fields ranging from agriculture, our first culture, to digital culture, our latest. The initiative has been awarded a three-year Swiss National Science Foundation Research Grant in the National Research Program 65 entitled New Urban Qualities. The research program “aims at (further) developing concepts and strategies for new urban quality and testing the feasibility of the research findings. The concepts will demonstrate innovative ways to achieve urban development, urban redevelopment, and urban planning in Switzerland that are realizable in the medium and long term. The concepts will base on the perspectives of urban planning and architecture, with researchers and experts in all relevant disciplines working together.”
FUI is conducted by an interdisciplinary team composed of four primary research groups, Verzone Woods Architectes (VWA), the EPFL Media and Design Lab (LDM), the Agri-food & Agri-environmental Economics Group (AFEE) of the ETHZ and Agroscope ProfiCrops. The design studies will be informed by techniques from the biological sciences, the social and the economic sciences and meet in the spatial realm of the contemporary city. The team is balanced between research and practice. Incorporating representatives of the agriculture and economic sectors and their academic branches into the FUI team as well as from both the academic and professional realms insures the preliminary step of implementation: connecting research to its application through feasible proposals.
Craig Verzone
Verzone grew up in the suburbs of Lowell before he studied landscape architecture at Cornell University (Presidential Scholar 1990) and urban design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (MLAUD 1992-94). In 1998, he received the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture from the American Academy. He has taught at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, the Joint Masters Program of Architecture at the University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland in Fribourg and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is licensed as a landscape architect in Massachusetts since 1994 and a member of the Swiss Federation of Landscape Architects, FSAP. In 1995, he and Cristina Woods established the multi-disciplinary design studio Verzone Woods Architectes.
Verzone Woods Architectes
VWA is a collaborative, multi-disciplinary practice working on landscape, urban design, and architecture projects as well as temporary installations and exploring the intersection of these realms is essential to our design process. VWA commissions have mostly been in Switzerland and Spain, although projects and/or competitions and installations have also occurred in France, Germany, Italy and the United States. Design practice at VWA occurs on a wide variety of scales, from a 50 x 50 cm concrete paver to a regional planning study covering 3’000km². The mental gymnastics of moving across these various scales between and within projects is vital to the work.